3 Mistakes Marketing Pros Actually RECOMMEND! With Peter Sandeen

 Yep, you heard right: 

3 things routinely recommended by marketing 'professionals' are in fact big mistakes... 

...and you can hear what they are in the brand new Growth Moves podcast interview with Peter Sandeen.

Peter is best known for creating marketing messages that make people immediately feel, “that’s perfect for me.” He’s often called “the marketers’ marketer” because over half of his clients are other marketing experts who want to see their own blind spots and make sure they’re focused on what matters most…. 

TRANSCRIPT (automated by Otter.ai so please excuse any little errors):

Rob Tyson
Welcome back listener. I'm here today with Peter Sandeen. And Peter is best known for creating marketing messages that make people immediately feel that is perfect for me. And I'm really happy to have Peter here he is often called the marketers marketer, because a lot of his clients are, in fact other marketing experts. But of course, they see the value in getting help with their own blind spots, and making sure they're focused on what matters most. And what we're going to talk about today with Peter. Peter is going to explain three mistakes, marketing pros recommend, and I really love what Peter has to say on this because I think he's completely on the money here about how a lot of the received wisdom will send you down totally the wrong path if you're not careful.

But before we welcome Peter and get into it, if you're listening to this show, chances are good, you have professional expertise that you would like to monetize and if you're ready to stop doing Okay, and take it up a gear if you're ready to turn your visibility into a real business that actually works for you and your clients and gives you hope for the future, then I'd like to invite you to my free web class and it's going to explain why the ascension model or value ladder that you've probably heard so much about is a disaster waiting to happen for most people in your position, and exactly what you should do right now instead, if you want to generate real cash flow, and finally get on the right track with monetizing your expertise, so that is free and all you need to do is pop along to robtyson.net/class for all the details that is robtyson.net/class. So with that said, Let us welcome Peter Sandeen. Peter, good to have you with us.

Peter Sandeen
Thanks for having me.

Rob Tyson
And, Peter, tell us a little bit about how you got into this in the first place around messaging, which is your your speciality now, correct.

Peter Sandeen
Yeah, so I started out as a copywriter, or, okay, I started out as a generalist, but that obviously didn't get me anywhere. So I then specialized in copywriting. And fairly quickly after that, I moved to conversion optimization where I stuck for a few years. But during that, it became very, very clear that what you actually say not how you say things, but what is the core promise that you make? What are the main ideas that you communicate, not how you do it, not the tactics you use to do it, but what are the core ideas of communicating that really makes the biggest difference, we could test all the usual moving a button here or there, or form here or there or change the headline to say the same thing in a different way and so on. That very rarely works, but it just gets a lot of attention when it does. So people often think that that's how you get good results. you tweak these small things, but but by seeing that really the big picture What are the core things that make the difference? That's where I started to focus more and more. And the messaging part became just the, like, that's sort of the catch all phrase for for those core ingredients for marketing.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, it's, it's interesting, isn't it with conversion rate optimization that, you know, I, I can understand why people can be really attracted to it because we can tend to think, Oh, well, you know, if we just change the color of our button, then it's going to solve all our problems. But as you rightly say, usually these things are incremental improvements at best and, and really the, the big improvements come down to thinking quite hard about the the core message and the big idea that we want to get across, right? Yeah.

Peter Sandeen
Pretty much. I think like if you're not changing something that makes people believe something different. You can't expect to see a difference in results. If If you don't change what people believe or feel about what you're saying or what you're offering, then it won't, it won't change the response. Obviously, if your button is damn hard to find, because it's almost invisible, then yeah, making it bright color will help. And that's how a lot of those sorts of test results come up that the old version was just absolute garbage. So then doing it by the book by even just applying like the very basic level of like good practices can create a good result. And yeah, like that's, that's, that makes sense. But beyond that, it's if tweaking those sort of incremental, almost meaningless things, just isn't really very, very effective at all.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, you need to dig deeper, you need to dig deeper. Yeah. And now I'm intrigued by this as well. And what we're going to talk about today is three mistakes that marketing professionals recommend. And I'm really interested as I said, because these are they kind of against the conventional wisdom that we hear a lot. And that's why I'm really interested to talk to you about these because I know these will be the kinds of things listeners are hearing. And so I think that this is a, this is an important conversation. So the very first one that is recommended to us often is use the most effective tactics. Use the most effective tactics that sounds okay on the face of it. Why is that a mistake.

Peter Sandeen
Because there are no most effective tactics. There are tactics that make sense, in your case, given your sales funnel, or as I call it, the conversion path. And that's it. And then there's also 1000 different ways of using each tactic. And there's probably 10 to 15 good ways of using all the major tactics you can use, for example, videos in very, very different ways that are very effective in different cases. In your case, there might be still three or five different effective ways to do those match with the other tactics and the ways you're using the other tactics. Maybe Maybe not. So instead of using the best way to do videos with the best way to do email marketing, no, like, you need to figure out how do they fit together? How do they form a, what I consider a path from the first contact to the sale. And like, it's really not about using the best tactic or buying into the idea that well those people get results with this tactic, so I should get results with it. Really not. It might be good for you. But even seemingly similar situations, you might be in the same market selling something very similar and the tactic use the same way can be completely useless for you while others are getting good results with it. Because tactics are really just individual pieces of a much bigger puzzle. So using the best tactics there, the problem is there are no best tactics. It is a bigger puzzle that you have to solve and only then sort of see which puzzle pieces do you need for it so that it is an entire puzzle

Rob Tyson
game I didn't know Interesting, isn't it? I suppose one of the one of the things that's interesting to me is that people, people buy tactics, don't they? You know, there is there is a market for tactics. And so very often we will get attracted to tactics, won't we, you know, when, when really we should be thinking more about the strategy, which is what you're suggesting, I think.

Peter Sandeen
Yeah, it's, it's easy to sell the simple promise, or the simple outcome, the simple, strong promise of just do this one thing, just use this one new tactic or this one new tool and look at the crazy good results these other people got. And most people want to believe that even those who have been burned by it 1000 times before they still want to believe that even if they don't they still want to believe that. So let alone those who haven't yet been burned so many times that they've completely lost trust in it. It is much easier to sell tactics and training. Around individual tactics or tools, then basically anything else because it is people like just human nature is to prefer the easy way, the fast way to results. It takes a lot of, I'm not sure if it's intelligence or what is it, but it takes a lot of something to be able to look at, well, I need to see the bigger picture, I need to buy the bigger picture instead of this seemingly easier, smaller, faster, cheaper thing.

Rob Tyson
Maybe it's wisdom.

Peter Sandeen
Perhaps I stray away from words like wisdom and stupidity, because they are very hard to define, but you can argue that it's wisdom.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, now what and so. So tell me this then. So what approach would you would you take I mean, if we, you know, let's say we do come across a new tactic which looks effective. Is there a test We can do or other questions we should ask ourself about whether this is something we should integrate into what we're doing. I mean, how would How would you approach that

Peter Sandeen
depends sort of where you are with your marketing, if you already have a clear strategy, clear path from the first contract all the way to the sale. If you understand how all the pieces of it work together, then you can see how an individual additional piece could help you.

Otherwise, you can't.

So until you have that whole path figured out, you shouldn't be looking at individual tactics at all, unless you're specifically searching for a tool or tactics that would fit a specific need. And that's sort of the like people very easily think of it backwards. And even the way you ask the question is sort of backwards, like people look at the individual tool. Could I use that? Because that's not the question you should be asking, should I use this or is this what I need is this what I'm searching for? Is this The thing that is most likely to help me get to the results I'm looking for. So if you're, let's say you're looking for a way to reach new people reach more new people, you have easily 100 different options. You have all the different forms of advertising all the different platforms. And yes, that you should always think of them all separately, even like Facebook and Instagram, completely different even though they're under the same roof, YouTube, Google completely different, even though under the same roof, LinkedIn, completely different, and so on. They are all very, very different. But then there's guest blogging, there's blogging, there's SEO, there's getting interviews, doing jayvees they like there's endless different options. Very few of those are realistically it should be even a consideration for you in the beginning. So just like that's just one of the like, that's just the very first thing. Like how do you reach new people? And if you're not very clear on what you're trying to like, what the what you're trying to achieve? achieve with a tactic. So if there's I mean, this is maybe a little extreme, but if someone's selling your Twitter training on how to make sales or how to make sales with Twitter, that's sort of ridiculous. Because like, I have never heard of anyone who would make consistent sales with Twitter, unless they have a lot of other things in place. So like, if you don't understand what you're trying to fill, or what part of the path you're trying to build, then you can't really evaluate at all if a tactic or tool would make any sense for you. So, really, it is more about understand the path first, are you just trying to build the first version of it or are you trying to add something new to it or are you trying to upgrade some parts of it? And then like, really look from that perspective, what is it that would fit in there?

Rob Tyson
And so obviously, you do you do have to come to a tactic at some stage. So I use are you are you suggesting then What I'm what I'm inferring from you is that in the early stages, we should almost forget the online marketing thing. And when we have a new product or service, we're almost selling it by hand. I mean, is that?

Peter Sandeen
Not quite, but rather that if you have like, let's say, you don't have any marketing yet, you're completely from scratch starting. Instead of being seeing that someone's selling, let's say a YouTube advertising course, that shouldn't really be too much of a concern for you. Rather, you should think of Okay, do I have a way to reach new people? Because I do need a wet some way of reaching new people. Okay, know, what would be a good option for me? Well, are they watching a lot of YouTube videos? No. Okay, so I don't need to think of YouTube advertising. Where are they actually? Well, they do search Google for this sort of results. Well, maybe Google advertising makes sense. Or maybe they are reading articles about the topic. online. So maybe guest blogging would make sense. So rather than what are sort of like the gurus are teaching like selling me, don't forget that what is sort of the easiest thing for you to buy, it should be irrelevant. And rather look at what are you actually trying to achieve? What is the most likely way to achieve that. And it can be sort of hard when there is 100 people promoting one product and everyone's saying that, Oh, this is perfect for everyone. Just go and buy it and you'll be rich. But like, seriously, we all know that that's not the case. It certain conditions do need to be met for any of those things to work. So rather think of it from your need, like what do you need and then go find that if you do find that, okay, you need YouTube advertising, then find someone who is teaching you to advertising,

Unknown Speaker
not just

Peter Sandeen
figure out if YouTube advertising could work for you because someone is selling you a course on it. That rarely is the best fit anyway. Sometimes Yes, but rarely is that the best fit

Rob Tyson
Yeah. I think from what you say, I suppose that it implies the the first job really is we need to get a really deep understanding of the dream client, the you know, the person who are the people we want to attract. Yeah, I know. And you'd probably agree with me this is something most people don't go into nearly enough depth on. Right?

Peter Sandeen
Yes. And and we might actually circle back to this at the end. But I think even those who do go into a lot of depth, they only do half of it. They only do one half of the whole process and they don't really like because all the normal exercises on the topic don't ask you to do the other half at all. So, but I think we'll circle back to that.

Rob Tyson
That's good. I like it. It's an open loop. We've got to come back to what

Peter Sandeen
is good. It's almost like we would do marketing.

Rob Tyson
Yeah. So So that's number so so when people say use the most effective tactics That is, that is a mistake. The second one is, I think follows on a little bit is build the most effective funnel. That's what we were told to do. So why is that a mistake? What's wrong with this advice?

Peter Sandeen
Yeah, so I just told you to basically figure out your funnel first and then find the right pieces. So why why not the most effective even if you're an expert, this still applies, but to a slightly lesser extent, but if you're not a professional sales funnel expert, then the most effective funnels are far too hard for you. It's completely ridiculous to consider that you could build those. It's not impossible, but the odds of success are miserable. Even the experts and I've talked with a bunch of them, I know a bunch of them and I've talked with many of them. They usually take three to six months to build their own funnel with the help of at least three other companies that handle video shooting, editing. And all Page Setup, writing emails, setting up landing pages, managing all the advertising and so on. If they would do this alone as a single person trying to do it alone or as for the first time with a small team, it would easily take a year. It makes no sense to try to do that the most effective funnels might be the most effective. They typically the results are not that much better than far simpler funnels, that I'm not saying they're not good funnels, they can be very effective funnels, but the very, very highly marketed funnels are also incredibly hard to do. They just take easily hundreds of hours to build and take a lot of expertise. And my actually main grievance with them is that if they don't work, and they can, like they often break if you have one thing wrong, they just nothing works. If there's one thing that doesn't work, and if it's this monster funnel with four different videos and a webinar And 100 different emails and 20 different landing pages and 100 different ads and retargeting ads and all that. How do you figure out? Where's the broken piece? I mean, I did conversion optimization for a few years, that's my primary thing. And I'd be seriously struggling to figure it out. Right? Like if a client came to me and said that I have this funnel, it's all done based on these instructions, and it doesn't work. I might just tell them that Okay, I'll take a quick look. But if I don't immediately see what's wrong, it's much easier that we just build something much simpler from scratch, then try to pinpoint what's the problem. So there's this very slight chance that you do hit the goal and get massive results immediately. And if you get 10,000 people trying then there will be those five people who get those results and those are the testimonials, awesome, great for them. But the other ones either never get to the end of it. Most of them don't because it's way more work than than they expect. Most of those who do get to the end, there's something that's not right. And they don't make any sales or they get way too few sales to justify the effort, and they have almost no chance of improving it. That's why this is something people don't often see from the other end. But the affiliates always see that's the big gurus are advertising to the affiliates that we have an all new funnel for this new launch. And it's because they have no way of improving the previous one. They just have to rebuild an entirely new one and just hope that it's better based on what they sort of think went wrong in the previous one. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it's a disaster. They don't usually talk about it publicly. But like sometimes it's a complete disaster. Because it's just too much guesswork, because you can't systematically improve anything that complex if you haven't done it incrementally, but like it's Yeah, just doesn't make any sense to start with something that's bigger for monster.

Rob Tyson
Now, I mean, I completely completely agree with With you, I, you know, I was just you, you touched on it there. There are so many links in, you know, what people commonly understand to be a funnel this, you know, in this mega complex thing, and it's only as good as the weakest link. So that's one problem, you know, you can create this thing and he, you know, if you do, even if you did 90% of it to a fantastic standard, which is unlikely. If, you know, if you're not very experienced at this and you're not a skilled marketer, then that 10% where you've screwed up, is going to break the whole thing. The other thing is, you're going to need to get a lot of traffic into this thing to even have a hope of figuring out where the issue is. And most people are not in the position where they have a big enough

Peter Sandeen
media budget

Rob Tyson
to do that, you know, so is it. It's overkill, you You know, for most of the people listening to this show, and just just generally from for most people, these things are way too complicated. And they're going to suck up your time, and they're going to suck up your money and your your will to live. Because they, you know, it's so so hard to get these things right. So just I'm completely with you on that, you know, we just need to need to begin with something much, much simpler.

Peter Sandeen
Yeah, when you said that you need to get a lot of people in, it means 10s of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Yeah, not just to the first page, but to join the email list, for example. So you might need to pay for a million clicks, to be able to like to even have a statistical chance of figuring out what's wrong. Obviously, if you have something just massively wrong, then that will show up relatively easily. But that's not usually the case. And I mean, there I could go on about the issues with that. Like you I start. Well, for example, one client he was, she was a marketer already, so she could do the videos fairly easily. I think she asked if we should have like a long video series. And I was like, No, no, let's start with two. First one is just content. And at the end, you tell that if someone wants to know about the product, they can click the link. And the next video is just you going through what the product is, and a few emails to like, just go around like just direct people to those videos. I think she's got a 6% can sales rate from opt in, like the landing page. So six out of 100 people who get to the opt in page by that's massive, and that's that was done. I don't know how many weeks but it was very quick compared to the launches that she had done previously. Compared to every funnel anyone is selling online. It's like nothing compared to those. And the results are like I don't, I mean, obviously I'm not saying everyone gets those sorts of results but 6% out of ad clicks to buy is ridiculous. It started, like calculating the numbers. It was $1,000 product. So

Unknown Speaker
the math I mean,

Peter Sandeen
really not on typical case. But just to show that like, if you do this many times, then you do get those outlier results, even with very simple funnels. So it's not about the complexity, you don't have to optimize everything to be able to get good results. So it's, yeah, it just doesn't there. The payoff doesn't make any sense with the massive funnels. Mm hmm.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, I know. So I mean, you know, I've seen seen clients do this as well, when they try to do too much split testing early on. So they will create, like, Here's 9 million ads in my facebook account, because, and I understand why because it's really attractive that this idea that Well, we know we can, we can test all these things and we can find the best one and that can be really good. But just be aware that in the early days, it really pays you to keep Quite simple and, you know, even if you are going to split test ads, I mean, you know, just you don't need 9 million, you know, just need to, you need to, you know, and and then you can just go from there. So just keep it simple is really what you want to do, I think,

Peter Sandeen
definitely, if it's so complex that you can't expect to improve it, if you can't expect to be able to analyze why it doesn't work as well as it could, then it's not worth the effort. It just doesn't make sense. But again, I think it's easier to sell, because then we can tap into a different sort of impulse, it's easier to sell the best, the fanciest, the most advanced funnel, then something super simple, because then it goes to the like, well if I'm gonna go through the trouble of building this massive thing, then I guess it has to be the best and like, I I totally see how that trick can improve results and that other tricks seems really clever too. And like of course I want to use all of them to maximize my result results and odds of getting a sale. So, like, it sort of makes sense. But the reality is that there's just, it's impossible to handle. Even most of the experts I work work with, we start with something simple and then just improve, we might end up with this massive funnel. But we don't start there. And if you build it one step at a time, then you can you're always sort of problem solving an individual specific issue. So then you add one piece that fixes the problem. It's not just what we add this one thing because maybe it works. No, like we add it, we see if it if it works. If it doesn't, we take it away. So it doesn't add complexity, and so on. So it's like, you might end up with a massive funnel at some point, but like, Don't try to start there. For goodness sake.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, no, absolutely. Hundred percent.

Peter Sandeen
I

Rob Tyson
finally reminds me Actually, I read some quote the other day. I don't know if you've heard it. I forget who it was, but it was something like it was something like Don't know something like, you know, perfection is not when there's nothing left to add. It's when there's nothing left to take away. So I don't know who said that, but I probably mangled it a bit. But

Peter Sandeen
I just thought, yeah, that's really good. You know, it's

Rob Tyson
trying to have less things really less fewer variables, fewer steps, only as many as you need.

Peter Sandeen
Yeah, I often talk about what I call marketing essentialism, which is exactly that. What are the fewest things we can do to get to the next step, as the most consistent way to get good results, instead of this? Let's build something that looks cool and hope for the best and one out of hundred will get amazing results. Like rather, how do we get 99% of the time to the good results, even if not quite as fast, usually actually much faster, but we don't get to the eight figure numbers overnight. Like technically, we might be able to with this massive thing with a massive budget and so on. Like, the consistency is completely different. But yeah, I I know the quote, I can't quote it any better than you and I don't remember who said it. I think there's a few different variations of it. But yeah, I live by that idea.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, good stuff. Well, we'll have to have to find out who that was. Alright, so that's great. So that was the second mistake. Marketing pros recommend they tell us build the most effective funnel. So the third one, you find the one we're going to talk about is this third mistake. We are told we need to tell people all the benefits they're going to get from us.

Peter Sandeen
So why is why is that bad advice? Well, now we get to the good stuff, the stuff I'm really into.

It gets me really excited. So

basically, people are usually in a situation where they are trying to sell something to people who don't really want to buy it. So marketing becomes an exercise of trying To convince people to buy something they don't want to buy, it becomes really convincing people easily turns to manipulating people, but like convincing is, I think, a good work. They're trying to convince people to do something they don't naturally want to do. And how you do that. There are basically two different ways you can try to like alarm them into it, like scare them into it, tell them about the terrible things that will happen if they don't do this thing. And obviously people tell you to do that too. I don't usually like it too much, but there's a place for it. But the other thing is like just tell them about all the magnificent things they can get by buying your thing and like just overload them with these amazing things. But if you think of what a stereotypical used car salesman sounds like it go you point to a car and ask what is it like and they will give you this long, long list of how it's great value for the money and it looks great and it's classic and small and big and spacious and good for long trips and short trips, and great for offroading and cityscape and great for a family and safe. And I mean, it just keeps on going. And you don't remember any of it, you're like the best case scenario is that your feeling of the car is that I guess it's okay because the sales guy thought it's perfect. That's the best you can think that it's okay. And if you can't afford anything, and if the sales guy is really good at convincing you to buy, then maybe you do buy it, but like your feeling is that well, it's okay. But if you go to another store, imagine that you point to a car and they tell you that Oh, it's ecological and family friendly and very safe. Are you interested? Like are those things very important for you? Well, if those are the most important things for you, then you're damn interested in that car. It's not that they need to convince you to buy but rather you start asking that like Well, is it cheap enough so you can buy it because you really want to buy it. So my point is that instead of trying to overload people with all of these outcomes, all If these benefits which they want, remember, once you have a list of five things, people don't remember any one of them or maybe one. Once you have 10, it all becomes this smush they don't have any idea what you said. So if you can figure out what are the most important things for people, then just say those, and their reaction will be holy crap. This is amazing. Like, how Haven't I found this before? Like, it's like it's built for me. And that's what I'm going for. So, as I said, the open loop we opened previously about the target customer, this is the other side. Traditionally, target customer things are more about, well, what sort of company is the target customer? Or like how big is the company or what industry do they operate in? Or are they a woman or a man or what age are they or what hobby Do they have or do they live in this city or this other city and all that made a lot of Since 20 years ago, because mostly marketing, not always, but like mostly marketing, less, more mass market, you couldn't target specifically you had to go to TV or radio, or maybe magazines. And you could go more specific to like industry magazines and such. But it was still very much about those sorts of demographics. It wasn't nearly as much about what's called psychographics. Not that it wouldn't have been important and it's not a new invention by any means. But it's far and far more important, especially for small businesses. Now that operates online. Because your potential is the entire world. You can pick people based on what they would actually like, and then sell them that. So if you start from thinking of well, what sort of people do you want to help and what are the most like best suited people for you, those who will most easily see that what you're selling is perfect for them, then you're no longer convincing them to buy but rather marketing It becomes about just showing them what you have, so that they can appreciate it. So that's sort of the the idea of just overloading people with outcomes. The problem isn't really the outcomes or telling people about outcomes, but rather how it shifts your perspective to the wrong thing. You need to first know the target customer, you need to have an offer that actually fits them that makes them think this is exactly what I want. I don't have any objection to buying it. And then thing of Well, how do you describe it, and then less this more, really, less this more, there is a way to use more outcomes and like if you study copywriting there's everyone's going to tell you that you need to just write about every outcome, every benefit every differentiator, and the longer the better. And there's truth to that, but it's really, really tricky to use, and I did copywriting so I shouldn't. But even though I should know how to do that, I still avoid it because it's so so risky. To talk about too many things. It becomes easy. Just for indistinct, for to indistinct, for people to remember. And for them to feel like this is exactly for me, instead of it looks cool, kind of like that used car. That it's like, yeah, okay, I guess it's okay. And people don't usually want to buy something they feel it's okay. They want to, they want to buy something that feels like it's just for them. It's exactly the things they want.

Rob Tyson
Yes, interesting, isn't it? So what I, what it sounds like you're describing is that if we don't come up with a good enough concept in the first place, we have to spend, we fall into this trap of spending a lot of time and effort trying to persuade people, you know, in a way and when really, we would have been better expending that energy at the beginning of the process and figuring out what what's, what are the you know, who are these people really, what do they really, really want? Putting in 80% of our time and effort in that stage. And then 20% of the effort on the promotion because actually, the promotion kind of takes care of itself and

Peter Sandeen
what most

Rob Tyson
people are doing is the other way it's the other way around. So they're not they're not really giving the concepts enough thought. And then as a result, they're having to clobber people tell them 10 million benefits and all this stuff. And, and that is the way of compensating for a concept that's weak. Is that fair? Fair enough.

Peter Sandeen
I think like it's not necessarily that the concept is weak, it's just not polished enough. It's somehow like there's slight misalignment and I'm obviously I'm just this is grammar police here almost but like it, a lot of people might hear the the thought as well. There's something wrong with my product is not good enough for something like that. And that's not necessarily at all the point. It is It's really more about the alignments, figuring out who are the right people for the offer, and then maybe polishing the offer a little changing. Maybe Elizabeth for those people. And obviously, there's often things like, well, if we find the right guarantee, we multiply sales happened a few times with my clients, even experts who had good guarantees before they were just basically meaningless guarantees. People didn't feel like those guarantees meant a lot to them, so they didn't affect sales. And if you come up with a good guarantee, it can make a huge difference to sales. But not to say that you need to always have a great guarantee, but just as an example, that even relatively small shifts in how you word a guarantee, or like what are the exact things you're guaranteeing can make a massive difference to some people. And if those are your target customers, brilliant. Otherwise, it's again, useless, wasted effort to come up with that guarantee. So it is more about the alignments between what you're selling and whom you're selling it to and how you're describing it. Not so much about like, objectively doing one or the other better. Obviously, the better you do those things, the better it is. But like it's often people basically do things well enough, especially on the product, or there's the service they provide is usually more than enough. On the quality side, it just doesn't align perfectly with what people are looking for or what their target customers wanted to be. They might be a classic example is that in the b2b side is especially people say that, well, we don't have time to implement this thing that you would sell us. Well, what if your offering included you doing the work for them? A lot of people immediately think that well, they wouldn't pay me for that. Well, they might. I've had clients who were they they added basically zero to the end of their usual bill and then offered it that well. Here's the option for me to do it for you. And here's the option or if you do it on your own, and like suddenly everyone is picking but 10 times higher build and like because they needed that It wasn't about the price, it was really they didn't have the time. But for some other clients that wouldn't be there at all. So it wouldn't help. So it's really more about the alignments, rather than doing better or doing difference, but rather just figuring out how to align all of those three things, who you're selling to what you're offering them, and how are you describing it?

Rob Tyson
And how do you figure those things out? Is it is it? Is it talking? Is it trying to talk to some of these clients? Or what do you what do you advise?

Peter Sandeen
Well, obviously, I sell this stuff. So take this with a grain of salt, but seriously, you need outside help. It's extremely hard to do for yourself. A lot of my clients are other marketing experts. More than half of them are other marketing experts, including a lot of people who do messaging specifically, and they've come to help because it's so hard to do for yourself. So if you can't get outside help, then at least try to figure out like more objective questions of what matters. If you ask people directly, you can do that. But it can be very misleading. I'm very hesitant to recommend it strongly. It's good to do. But it can be very misleading because we humans are generally very bad at understanding our own behavior. So if if you ask people, why do you buy this thing? Or why don't you buy this thing? Most people genuinely don't know, they will come up with a reason. But they are usually wrong, or at least very often wrong, so much so that the data becomes misleading for you. Or if they do know, we also often don't want to tell you the real reason because if I mean the classic example I use is that well, why did I buy an iPhone? For like 800 and something euros like ridiculous for a phone? And the reason I always would have said is that while it syncs the calendar and such things really nicely with my computer, come on. Seriously, do I pay over 800 euros for the sinking of like no, obviously It's something else, but it's not like I'm gonna say out loud what it is. I mean, I might but like most people have never even thought of what it would be. It's it's most like there's this clear truth that people always complain about, but it's not true. But trust me it is. People make decisions emotionally. They buy things emotionally. And they justify those decisions to themselves to their partners in personal life and in business. With logic, they don't make the decisions logically, they make them emotionally. And then they come up with this bullshit reasons like oh, it syncs the calendar. So like, if you go and ask, you can't expect them to give you the right answers, even if they want to. Some of them will, but you can't tell who are the ones who can tell you and will tell you the right answers. So it's not so much about that. It's usually something that you can figure out on your own. If you get some help out. Some outside perspective and it can even be a friend who just asks you like, Well, why do you think they care about that? Or, like, why is that important for them? Like just ask tons of questions that just force you to dig deeper into it. That's like that can help. But seriously, like, again, I do sell this stuff so little, like, questionable that I say that but genuinely, you should get a little bit of help from someone who knows what they're looking for.

Rob Tyson
Now, I completely I completely agree with you hundred percent. You know, we can't we can't see the wood for the trees. Do you have that expression in in Finland?

Peter Sandeen
We have some other formats. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Rob Tyson
Now the msmc right, where we are just too close to what we're doing to really get any kind of anything, even approaching an objective view on it.

Peter Sandeen
And so getting outside help He's really important and completely with you on that one. And if I if I have to give like a tip of what you can do that helps usually, even if you do it on your own about your own thing is to forget that objectively valuable outcomes. And think of what is the feeling people get. I'm not saying it's the only thing that matters. And I'm not saying you necessarily find the best ideas, but it's usually very helpful to think of what feelings do they get? What will what can they think to themselves, and that's important, just think to themselves, not tell anyone else. So what do they think to themselves a month after getting the outcomes that your help can provide about that are related to it? Is it that well, if you help them grow their business, then is it about well, they can feel like they're a good husband or a good wife? Or can they feel like they're setting a good example for their children or can they feel at ease and actually sleep knowing that like, not needing to think about their business and not feeling stuck? First of all, what is it? Like there's tons of options there. But if you just force yourself to write down, they will feel this. And specifically motions Don't try to turn it well, they will feel happy about these results, they get like no worse, will they actually feel the emotions, you're usually at least a couple steps forward and closer to what, what really matters to those people. How you turn that into marketing is, again, a little bit of a challenge, but like that, that gets you at least a lot closer.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, completely, completely with you on that one. And that's, that's been a kind of a revelation to me gradually over a number of years, is just this idea of people, because you say, you know, doing things to get a certain feeling, even if they don't admit it to others, and sometimes not even to themselves, usually not even to themselves. Yeah,

Peter Sandeen
yeah, yeah. It's like understanding our own emotions. Yeah. Our own buying decisions.

Rob Tyson
Well, that's right. But as as marketers, I suppose that's what we need to be attuned to, isn't it? Yeah. No really, really good. It's been really good. So Peter, just to wrap up, if, if listeners only took one nugget or piece of advice away from this conversation, what should it be?

Peter Sandeen
I think kiss keep it simple, stupid. That's that's something that my music teachers, many of them actually over the years will tell. Not specifically to me, but to the whole class that that was sort of how you how you got better at things. But seriously, in marketing, just keep it simple. Figure out the fewest number of things you can do that really make a difference. Whether it is how many different target customers you have, usually one is the correct answer. It's rare that companies would have the resources do you immediately go after many, there are exceptions, plenty of them, but generally much easier. To optimize things for one specific target customer, with one specific offer with maybe some variations of it, and then one specific message for them with very few ideas in it so that it just makes things so much, much easier. And then build marketing based on what we have set that some arbitrary number, like we have five different tactics and tools we can use what what are those, if we can only have five different tactics and tools together? What are they? Like, you're really you really need to rethink things to be able to do that. And it forces you to think very helpful things. So just really, really simplify things and think of like, what are the essential parts that make things work?

Unknown Speaker
And yeah,

Peter Sandeen
keep yourself from buying more more shiny objects. Because that's, that's rarely very helpful. Sometimes Yes, but rather think from the perspective of what do you need and then go look for it. Not so that when people offer you specifically a tactic or tool Something that like, oh, that that must be the best. Like, I buy a ton of those things, and they are just like, well, I need to learn these things. I need to see these things so I can recommend them forward. But like I mean, I should buy those things not not everyone else.

Rob Tyson
Yeah, well, yeah, that's good advice. go on a diet go on a kind of information diet, I suppose. No Really good. Really good. So where can people get more from your pizza? where's the best place for them to To find out more about you?

Peter Sandeen
Well, my website is https://petersandeen.com/. There's one fairly helpful exercise actually for the messaging parts. Its https://petersandeen.com/value. It's just a two page two page PDF that asks you a few questions and asks you to rather brutally rank things and score things. And that's good to me. I mean, a lot of expert marketers have sent me an email saying that like, Damn, like I've been in this business for a decade or two, and I never seen All these things like this way so not everyone's going to get that sort of revelations but it does help a lot of people get more objective about what are they actually saying in marketing because it forces you to rank them so brutally that it reveals quite a bit of things.

Rob Tyson
That's good so that's it https://petersandeen.com/value is that right value yep value. Awesome. Well, great. Well Peter really enjoyed it and and appreciate you giving up your time. It's been really good and an interesting conversation. So do appreciate you coming on and and I will talk to you soon.

Peter Sandeen
All right, I have fun. Thanks for having me.