#241: How To Deliver The Right Message To Your Prospects At The Right Time
In this episode, you're gonna learn how to find the right message to say to your customers, when to say the right message, and how to deliver it.
Luigi:Welcome back to another episode of the How to Sell podcast. I'm your host, Luigi Cressonendi, and as always, I'm honored that you have joined us for what's gonna be a very intentional podcast, and I'll tell you why intent is a key part of this week's podcast. If you're a long time listener, thank you very much for showing up each and every week and being part of our community. We value your contribution. And if you're a first time listener, welcome.
Luigi:We hope you take away some actionable insight that'll help you sell more. Now I'm really excited about this week's episode because this week, I think with all the automation tools that are out there, a lot of people are getting spam, Dave, and I know that you were one of those individuals just using sequencing tools because, look, our listeners know you that you can't sell and that's what you and I formed growth forums so I could help you learn how to sell. As I think this is a great episode you for you this week, Dave, to learn about the importance of intent.
David:I am getting coached by, Van Dam on kickboxing, so I could just get you on in the chin. Now on a on a serious note, you know, it is a good one for both founders, sellers, and marketers alike because once you hear who we have on this, on this episode, you're gonna recognize his name. I've been a massive follower of this gentleman for for many, many years, for the great work he's done, geeked out on his content. So it's an honor and a privilege to have Rand Fishkin on the podcast today. Welcome, Rand.
Rand:Thanks for having me, Dave. Thank you, Luigi too. Yeah. Good to be here.
Luigi:Yeah. And, mate, we're just I think before we jump into the intent piece, I mean, you, have done amazing things in your career even working with, the likes of HubSpot in the early days before they became an absolute behemoth of of an organization. Maybe you can just tell us a bit about sort of what what motivated you to get started in the world of entrepreneurship and and and start your own sort of business.
Rand:Yeah. So I, dropped out of college in 2001. And love the Internet. Was fascinated by it. But was terrible as a web designer.
Rand:Absolutely miserable web designer. Doug, Doug, my, my mom and I's small business into, almost half a $1,000,000 of debt. And that is that is what turned me into an entrepreneur because basically, we had to we had to dig ourselves out of that debt before my dad found out that we had it. So yeah. So I, I'm a I'm a very accidental sort of entrepreneur.
Rand:Right? I I started working for my mom's small business and, like, doing web design. And then, the only reason I got into SEO is because we had we had SEO subcontractors, you know, that we were working with, and we couldn't afford to pay them. So it was like, Rand, you have to do the work. Like, you've gotta learn how to do SEO yourself because there's nobody else.
Rand:And for years. Yeah. You know we were digging out a debt. I was making no money and and then SEO turned into this huge wave that that we rode with the the the blog I started, SEOmoz, that turned into the company moz, became a, you know, VC backed software company. We almost sold to HubSpot, as you mentioned.
Rand:And, and I, yeah, had a lot of Had a lot of success with that company, but, eventually it sort of plateaued. I stepped down as CEO. I was there a few more years and then, then left and started the company that I run now, which is SparkToro, which is in the audience research world rather than SEO.
David:Yeah. Awesome. And I think that that's a great sort of leading, Rand. Look. What's what made you see as an opening there to to go down the road of Spark Toro?
David:What did you see as a missing gap, you know, from your time at Moz and, you know, that lead you down to developing something like this?
Rand:Yeah. So I think, relatively early in sort of what's what's been happening in the last 6, 7 years, especially, I noticed that a ton of people, who were searching for products and services, who were being influenced by forms of marketing were no longer just going to Google. But, you know, Google had been this this behemoth for for 15, 20 years. Absolutely. It's still powerful.
Rand:It's still a powerful source for for marketing, but it is not the only place where people learn about products and services and fewer and fewer buyer journeys are exclusively done on Google. And so seeing that data. Right. Seeing that people were not just going to Google to to search for their, you know, answers led me to this idea of how can I help marketers, and, you know, product folks and entrepreneurs find the sources of influence for their audience that is that are outside of Google? And I think I think that's a huge frustrating pain point even today.
Rand:Right? I, you know, I I don't wanna pretend that SparkToro has, like, solved this problem. And it it it has not completely. A lot of people were that we talk to were doing this through surveys and interviews, which is, you know, no offense to those those, tactics. I actually love surveys and interviews.
Rand:I recommend them to almost everyone doing audience research, but I think they're absolutely terrible for figuring out, you know, which podcast do my customers subscribe to and what websites do they visit and what are their demographic well, demographics. Some demographics are great for it, some not so much, but behaviors online, like which YouTube channels they subscribe to or what subreddits are they reading or which social networks they use the most. Like, those things cannot be well answered by surveys and interviews. That's the problem we wanted to solve.
Luigi:And it's amazing that you bring this up, right, because I find I mean, you're talking more from that I think every marketer, every business that's looking to market to their audience shouldn't be on Google. And, you know, if they're creating content, like, we're all told to create content, but if you don't know where your audience is consuming that content or what they want to consume, then potentially you're creating content just for the sake of creating content. Right? And I I often talk to a lot of sales people, and that's one of the the sort of the big red flags that I hear initially. They're saying, well, I'm reaching out and I had a workshop last week and I asked them I said, hey, what are the if you were to have them sitting across the table, what are the top three things that, top of their mind right now?
Luigi:And none of them could answer that question. They were like, we don't know the answer to that. I'm like, well, if you don't know the answer to that, how are you then designing the buying journey? How are you then asking the right questions when you engage with them if you don't know what's on the top of their mind? We'd love to know from your opinion now that you've been working in this space for such a long time.
Rand:Mhmm.
Luigi:Why do you think so many people are reluctant to go down that path of research before they go to market?
Rand:I I mean, I'll be totally honest. I don't like to do it. It's not it's not quite uncomfortable. Right? So Yeah.
Rand:Look. I I do a lot of this. Right? I I reach out to to friends and folks in the industry that I've known in in sort of the digital marketing world and in the business and tech world. And I'm like, hey, could I, know, bug you for 30 minutes of your time and hop on a call and talk to you about what's going on in your world and essentially interview you?
Rand:I did I did so many of these, probably a 100 and 50 plus of these before we launched SparkToro, back in 2020. And you know what? I think you eventually get comfortable with it, but it's still, it's still kind of like pulling teeth. Right? It's it's awkward.
Rand:It, it feels a little salesy and spammy. Yeah. You know, it's not, it's not organic. It's tough to make that feel, thoughtful and empathetic and to provide value to that person. Right?
Rand:Because you're essentially just just sucking up data. So, look, I completely empathize with people who say, I don't wanna do it. I don't understand how to do it. The the methodologies are hard. There's all these barriers.
Rand:Right? It's not look. You guys use lots of automated tools. Right? If you wanna set up an email sequence in HubSpot, you just do it.
Rand:Like, it's just done. Right? It's it's right there. If you need to set up a newsletter in Mailchimp, you just do it. If you wanna set up a WordPress blog on a website, you just do it.
Rand:If you wanna do some keyword research, you can go to Moz or SEMrush or Ahrefs, and you just do it. Mhmm. But if you wanna interview a bunch of customers and understand their needs and wants and desires and what's on the top of their mind and what are their sources of influence, I mean, like Yeah. No AI is gonna help you. Right?
Rand:Like, chat gpt can't do it.
Luigi:Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I had to do that as a body of work for a very large client of ours, and I had to research the CFO. But the CFO for mid market organizations was their persona. And I remember I I literally had to cold call CFOs to run the interview to build that persona. And you know what was interesting though?
Luigi:I did. I I rang I rang maybe 60, and I was able to get 30 to say, sure. I'm happy to jump on a call, but you are right. It was laborious. It was time consuming.
Luigi:I can I can I, you know, I found it difficult? So I definitely understand why people are hesitant, but I'll tell you what, at the end of that process, the way I viewed that role was completely different.
Rand:Exactly. Exactly. Like, the beautiful thing is when you have those conversations, I believe this is just how human beings work. We develop empathy for the people that we talk and interact with. Right?
Rand:Yep. And so if you have those interactions, I mean, you can take this to to any extent. Right? You throw 2 people on a desert island and you know what? A lot of times they become friends.
Rand:Right? Because you're trapped in this situation together and
David:and you
Rand:get things going. This is this is one of the reasons that people talk about political divisiveness happening more so in communities where where people don't interact with each other than in communities where they do. Right? It's just because if you get people together, they start to understand each other. They can see things from another person's point of view.
Rand:I think that's wonderful and beautiful. And, also, it's hard and awkward to put yourself out there. Right? I mean, I'll tell you, I get nervous just sending the email sometimes where I'm like, gosh. I don't know this person real very well.
Rand:It feels sort of awkward. How am I gonna phrase the email in such a way that that sort of strikes the right tone and doesn't sound sketchy? I don't sound like a spammer, and I also don't sound desperate. Like, I you know, I don't wanna come across in all these ways. That's hard.
Rand:It's hard to do.
David:No one likes to do it. Right? And like you said, Louie, you're actually getting paid to actually do the job. Yeah. And even still, you're like, oh, this is awkward.
David:You know, you don't want to do it. It's it's quite a challenge. I love to dive into Rand. But let's talk about, you know, SparkToro itself. And then, Louis, let's tie it back to how salespeople and founders can use, you know, a tool such as this to help them get lead with insight, to get intent, so it can turn their cold outreach to warm outreach.
Rand:That's good. Yeah. So I am going to suggest that. Because I am quite uncomfortable selling and I don't like to sort of push my own product. And so I'm going to suggest that the process of audience research is what's more important than the specific tool you use to do it.
Rand:And SparkToro is, you know, you can go try it for free. It does a lot of these things. It might be useful to you if it is wonderful. Thrilled to have you play around with it for free or with a paid account. But in my opinion, the job of a salesperson and a and a marketer is to find the is to say tell the right message in the right place at the right time.
Rand:That's that's essentially your whole job. Right? All you all you're really doing is you are communicating something that hopefully can help a person who's experiencing a problem or a pain point or make them aware of a problem or a pain point that they weren't aware of before. And then hopefully turn that into an economic exchange of value where their problem gets solved and you get a return from it. And now you can go solve your problems with with that currency.
Rand:Right? So, you know, there's a lot of things about capitalism I don't love, but I kinda love the freedom and flexibility that that this provides. So the right message, I think this is where, Luigi, like the the like you were talking about, those interviews are so crucially important. What what I learned the most from those interviews is how people talk about the problem that they have and the solution that you provide. And if you use the same language that your customers, your best customers use to describe the problem and your solution, you will have so much more success.
Rand:I rarely do this in sales. Right? I'm not a salesperson, but I do exactly that with conversion copy. Right? Conversion focus copy on landing pages and in emails and in advertisements and, you know, in the presentations that I create.
Rand:What I'm trying to do is tap into the empathy that I have for people going through a particular problem set and describe it the way they would describe it. If you can do that, if you can, you know, use that language, superpower, total superpower. And if you're describing in a different way, your results are often subpar. Second thing is right place. So for for sales folks, I think the biggest value that I've heard for understanding an audience's sort of sources of influence is building that shared connection of like the current zeitgeist of their world.
Rand:Yep. If that makes sense. So it's kinda like how, if you wanna talk to, again, I'm not a huge sports fan, but if you wanna talk to fans of a particular team and you have listened to the same sort of radio commentary and podcasts and watch cast and watch the same shows and read the same, you know, sports journalists who've written about the team, you have like a shared language around that stuff. You know what's going on in the world of of your team. And so when you sit together at the pub and you have a drink about it, suddenly you're like, yeah.
Rand:Yeah. That thing he said, I thought that was insane. But this other thing, I really agree with that. And Mhmm. You know, it build it builds connection.
Rand:Right? And it's the same thing in in sales or in marketing or advertising. If you can have that, understanding of the content your customers are consuming and shared experience around it. Amazing. Especially if you're going to do any kind of direct promotion.
Rand:So I've done this a few times where I spoke at an event, you know, something like like like this podcast, right, or a video series, and then followed up with people who saw or heard me there and was like, Hey, we had this conversation about this here. Here's, you know, here's, what's going on here. So I think I can help solve the problem. And the last one is, is right. Timing.
Luigi:So how do you mouth about that?
Rand:Yeah. That's hard. I don't think right. Timing can be. Oh, so hard.
Rand:I I think the only thing I found that's excellent for timing is people care about certain things before they ever need your product. You know you know what I'm talking about? Right. So they like they're sort of predictors of, well, eventually, you're gonna hit this problem that our solution can can help you with. And if you can talk about those things, the content creation that you guys were mentioning, if you can talk about those things, if you can have email sequencing around those things, if you can be in the places where those discussions take place, that that's sort of the timing.
Rand:And then you wait, you know, you get them on your email list. You get them knowing about your brand. And then when they have the need, hopefully, they're contacting you. Right? They're coming back to your site.
Rand:They're filling out the form. They're trying to demo all that. Yeah.
Luigi:It's it's absolutely you you you you know, what what you're saying, I'm resonating with so much because that's a big part of what we talk about. Right? We talk about, you know, we often want people that are at the action stage of the sales or the buying journey. Yeah. They're ready to buy.
Luigi:But in most cases, that's a very small portion of the market, and there's a portion that not just that consideration, but you've got the ones that are at that pre contemplation stage. Right? They're at that. I know I've got a problem. Actually, I don't even think I've got a problem, but then your content makes me ask some questions and go, hang on a second.
Luigi:Should I, you know, should I lift the lid on what this problem is? And because if I lift it and I see it, maybe I can't unsee it. Right? Because it's interesting, you know, I've worked with a couple of partners from a, a big fin services firm, and and professional services firm, and that's what they often say. They say sometimes our our buyers or our our potential clients, they don't actually wanna talk to us because they don't wanna become aware of the problem.
Luigi:Because if they become aware of the problem, then they they have to take action. Right? So it's interesting that you bring that up.
Rand:Yep. I I mean, I think where the where the power comes into play here from a from an audience understanding perspective is if you can identify the sort of full customer journey. Right. And say, I know that many customer journeys that result in buying this product that I don't know helps with fraud and fintech or whatever it is. Those conversations begin in social media discussions, blog posts on certain websites and and subreddits, all around phishing scams.
Rand:Yeah. Like, okay. Well, if I'm I'm making this up. Right? But if those are the places where those things start and you can be a voice in those conversations around what's happening and become a trusted resource.
Rand:It's a superpower, right? Like you you go from, being someone who's trying to sell to someone who's trusted to help.
David:Yeah. You could see how it really relates there. So, look, one one use case I've seen before is, you know, a group of people being really active in a in a subreddit and then interacting within that subreddit, providing value, providing advice. And then when the issue arrives for that particular, you know, group of people, they then trust you. Right?
David:And I was only aware of the subreddit through understanding where the type of people that I'm trying to sell to and support actually spend time, right, which is one of the biggest, you know, hurdles you have. You think you assume that they're all here. You assume they all read this magazine because the total magazine is the CFO Magazine. But, you know, it's a particular subset that you're trying to target that may not be in that area. Can you walk us through, Rands, you know, define us, look, what is important to your buyers?
David:Look, when someone's signing up to SparkToro, you know, what's what are the problem they're trying to solve?
Rand:So, we we actually have a a very high diversity of users, in terms of, of what they're trying, what their job description role title, is, I would say a healthy amount of agencies, maybe about 40% agencies, 30, 35 percent in house firms, usually smaller and medium sized businesses, a few enterprises, and a good number of like government nonprofit research, product creators, that kind of stuff too. What ties them together is the problem that they wanna solve. So essentially, you know, if somebody says, boy, I really wish I knew all the YouTube channels that interior designers in the United States, subscribe to. And I wish I knew which ones in order were more and less popular because then I can fill in the blank. Right?
Rand:They have some some job to do from that. That might be they're gonna pitch to be on those YouTube channels. It might be they're gonna subscribe and listen to them so they can better understand their audience. It might be they're gonna engage in the comments. It might be that they're gonna invite some of those YouTube hosts to come speak at their event.
Rand:It could be that they're gonna just take the YouTube channels and plug them directly into their Google Ads account and, you know, reach people that way. All of those use cases are fine. Like go for it. Right. I, I, we're here to provide the data, not to tell you what you can and can't do with it.
Rand:Yeah. But I would say those, those kinds of same problem with, a lot of folks who I like to call this the Wall Street Journal problem. You guys will tell me if this is familiar to you, but essentially, you know, you have a client, or you have a CEO, a CMO, a chief revenue officer officer, and they say, Hey, our customers all read the wall street journal. I want you to get us in the wall street journal. And you're like, oh my God, are you serious?
Rand:Like a, that pitch is going to be insanely difficult. And B I know that if we one day end up on one article, on one page of the Wall Street Journal, it's gonna have this much impact. My goodness, it's gonna be just, for those of you who are listening, my fingers are extremely close together. I'm just I'm just saying that like this, this whole idea of if only we could get into this one place, our whole business would transform. Mind numbingly over simplistic and wrong.
Rand:Yeah. And most practitioners know it's wrong. But if you can bring data to that battle and you can be like, Hey, you know, boss team climb, take a look. Wall street journal has, you know, whatever it is, a 47 affinity with this customer group. But turns out, you know, this subreddit, for Fintech is in the 80s.
Rand:Maybe we should be participating there. Right. And look, you can see exactly how many users are on every thread every day. I can tell you there's about 800 of our key prospects who are visiting that subreddit at any given time. Maybe that's the place for us to be.
Rand:You can see the number of subscribers Yeah. Is quite powerful.
Luigi:Yeah. So kind of what I'm hearing you say is that, you know, because some exec or someone in the organization might consume or they might see that that's a great channel to be putting content through. It doesn't necessarily mean that's where your audience is engaging and spending the time or giving you the return because there are other channels. And that's fundamentally what SparkToro does. Right?
Luigi:It enables you to get more guidance and help you plan and direct where you should be focusing your attention from a content, circulation perspective.
Rand:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I'll give you an example of this that, yeah.
Rand:That I really like. Like I love one of the things that I love about spark to is being able to, Sort of dispel myths, right? Myths that exist in your organization about who a customer is or what their behavior is. So I was talking to someone a couple of days ago who who's helping a client in the wine investing space, like people who invest in wine as a as a financial instrument, which I thought, oh, that's sort of fascinating. It sounds like, I don't know, fancy billionaires on TV or something to me, but I'll go for it.
Rand:Like I drink wine, but I don't, yeah. Like I, I don't expect that bottle I'm sitting on to, you know, be worth more anyway. So I, I look in spark Toro for the audience that searches for wine investing. And it's sort of fascinating because the person I'm talking to is immediately like, oh my god. Yes.
Rand:This this is exactly what I said. There's a there's a little, Venn diagram or sorry, not Venn diagram, pie chart at the top of the results that shows a gender and age breakdown. Right? So it's basically it's showing in this case that it's like 47% men and maybe 39% women. And then, you know, small percent of non binary folks and some people who don't Yeah.
Rand:Specify their gender. But this person is like, yes. Look at this. It's much the audience is much younger and much more gender diverse than my boss or my client thinks they are, and I can take this to the bank. I have been trying to tell them that new people who are getting into wine investing, the people who are actually searching for the keyword, they are not the 65 year old multimillionaires.
Rand:Those people already know about wine investing. They're not searching for the keyword anymore. And so we're not speaking to them with our content when we create content for searchers for wine investing. And I I was like, oh, yeah. That's awesome.
Rand:That is so powerful to be able to take that Yep. To your client and show them you're trying to create content for the wrong audience, and I can prove it.
David:Just a quick interruption to let you know about a free resource that Luigi and I wanna hand over to you. This resource has helped lift close won rates to over 73% on average. Plus, you'll get a b to b sales newsletter that drops weekly where you can learn what it takes to build a repeatable sales process and creating a pipeline full of qualified deals. To get this resource, just go to growthforum.io/newsletter or click the link in this episode and sign up today.
Luigi:The big takeaway for me from this interview, Rand, is that it just reinforces the need to really understand your audience because it doesn't matter what you're doing from a marketing perspective or from a sales perspective. Fundamentally, we're trying to achieve the same outcome. Right? We're trying to get more people into our funnel and progress into a point of decision so they buy our product or service. I mean, that's ultimately what we're trying to do from a revenue growth perspective.
Luigi:And I think, again, this just reinforces the need that and the desire that we should all have to really understand our audience, understand how they're talking, what are their problems, how can we better understand them so that we can empathize? And potentially, like you said, they're not all ready to buy, so potentially, there needs to be a part of from a buying and customer journey perspective that we need to cater for with different content based on where they're at versus somebody that's down the funnel already considered ready to take action. And that I've just, you know, I know a great episode when I've got some notes on my phone and this has been another great episode, Rance. I really thank you very much for bringing that insight and helping our audience and and helping them see things a little bit differently. Absolutely.
Luigi:My pleasure.
David:Louie, another sick episode there. Ran is an OG in the marketing space. This tool, how would you actually use it, right, in your day to day life when prospecting to understand where our audience are. Alright, Dave. That was
Luigi:a really, really insightful episode, and I I do wanna break it down before we wrap up this session. I wanna break it down, around how you can utilize the insight that he shared to build your outreach mess messaging. Right? And I think the key the key for this is you've got to understand your customer. So the biggest takeaway from the whole episode doesn't matter where you go to find this information, doesn't matter if you use his platform, if you interview customers, you've got to actually know the problems that your buyers face.
Luigi:Yeah? And you've got to think about not just the problems, but what are the other issues that the problem actually impacts across their business. Yeah? And once you've determined that part, then it's about, well, how do I now build my outreach messaging? Well, it's about thinking, okay, what insight can I leverage?
Luigi:What insight can I share that gets him thinking about the problem from a different perspective? Yeah. And for me, this is a game changer. Like, if we look at all the results that we've seen from all the different people that are going through the sales OS program right now, You know, take that individual from Grant Thornton. They leveraged a piece of insight on a particular topic.
Luigi:They've got the prospect going. You know what? I wanna learn more. Right? They helped them see something completely different.
Luigi:They got them into the conversation, and the rest of the process kind of took care of itself. Yeah. So the biggest takeaway as you're listening to this episode, as you're listening to us wrap it up, you've got to have a relentless focus on understanding your audience, understanding the problems they face, and understanding what drives them to take action.
