• 21:01
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Digital game plan, marketing roadmap, manufacturers, AI integration, ideal customer, unique value proposition, market segmentation, customer stories, Blue Ocean Strategy, strengths and opportunities, customer personas, digital community, configurator, customer testimonials, marketing strategy.
SPEAKERS
Speaker 1, Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson
Damon Pistulka 00:03
All right, everyone, it is Friday, and you know what that means? It’s time for stop being the best kept secret. I am your co host, Damon Pistulka, and that pretty gentleman over there, Kurt Anderson, is going to take it away today as we talk about the digital game plan and how it is a marketing roadmap for manufacturers, we’re a little late today.
Curt Anderson 00:25
I think we got, I think we got in right on time. Did we get
Damon Pistulka 00:27
in right on time? Little these pet emergencies once in a while?
Curt Anderson 00:31
Yeah, we have, we have pet emergencies once you know, poor little Louie. So yeah, all right, guys, happy Friday. Everybody. Welcome to stop being a best kept secret. My name is Kurt, my dear friend, my partner in crime, Damon pistolka, we are honored and privileged to have you here with us today. Drop us a note. Let us know where you’re coming from. Love to hear. Connect with Damon, connect with myself on LinkedIn, yeah, and we’re going to take a dive into the digital game plan. And what this is, this is a little software tool that Damon and I have created, and Damon, I’m super excited today, like we’re our new tool is actually going live next week. Man, what do you? How do you? How do you feel about that?
Damon Pistulka 01:07
Well, I can tell you, there are a lot of, not a lot of literally 1000s of hours that went into this over the years. And then, you know, because if you think about how many years it took to go, Okay, what? What is it? What’s really happening? And then you went together, and you had a Google sheet that was doing it. And then that Google Sheets gone under, you know, so much revisions and things to talk about, yeah, you know who your ideal customer is, what’s your strengths and opportunities, and all the things that we have in the digital game plan. And then AI levered in on top of it, and we’re like, oh, now what can we do? And then just the gazillion hours that we put in to go, how does AI fit into this? How does it help us be faster, both in helping the clients we have and then develop using what we learned there to develop the system, and now the product itself is, is leveraging all that knowledge moving forward.
Curt Anderson 02:03
Yeah, super, super excited. So we’re working out some last minute kinks, and we’re going to be going live with it now. We’re going to be announcing it. Well, we’re kind of announcing it right now, I
Damon Pistulka 02:12
guess. Yeah, we’re kind of announcing it now, but we’ll bring it to the world.
Curt Anderson 02:15
We’re going to we’re getting a sneak preview. So let’s you know what. Let’s get underneath the hood. We’ll take a look at how the digital game plan actually works, and we’re gonna be fast and furious today.
Damon Pistulka 02:26
Yeah, it really has evolved. You know, it’s a system. It’s a system. It’s the other software helps us follow the system guidelines in there, and that’s what I love about it. It’s like people know EOS and business, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. You know, the digital game plan system really is a, a similar marketing equivalent,
Curt Anderson 02:44
yeah, yeah, that’s a great you know what? Let’s so I’ve got B to B TAIL. I’m going to, you know what? Let me stop sharing. I’ve got a, I’ve got a fun one that I’m going to pull up here. Okay, let’s take a look at and talk while I’m pulling this up. Just talk a little bit about the system, if you would please.
Damon Pistulka 02:58
Yeah, you know the system behind this all is really about clarifying your strengths and then identifying your unique value proposition through understanding where my opportunities in the market are, and really diving deep into your customers, and we break them down into because, like you know you as you started it Kurt. We’re baseball people. And we go singles, doubles, triples and home runs and and break your customers into those segments, and then really dive deep in those customers and go, Okay, who are? What segment do we want to go after? Because they talk about this, right? It’s identifying your your your soul mate or your ideal customer profile. Then you figure out segmenting your market, and really dive deep in there, and then it helps you understand, what can we do to help these people know more about us? And what content can we create? How can we create referral relationships with what kind of places it’s it’s just really cool, how that system behind it is, what gives the framework to the to the software,
Curt Anderson 04:02
I agree 100% and I’d say, like, looking back over my career, if I said, you know, I’ve made, you know, and I know people try to be humble and say, like, I’ve made millions of mistakes, like I’m not even being humble, like I’ve made millions of mistakes. And I think one of the biggest is when you try to be everything to everybody. And I and I get so frustrated myself, because I find myself doing this. We can do this. We can do this. And, you know, hey, if you’ve built a huge team and you’ve got, you know, kind of like that book, you and I love that book, who, not how, you know, and you can play quarterback, and you’re throwing a ball to other people that are doing things. But you know, for our folks that are like the solo marketers out there, or small manufacturers. You know, when we try to be that everything to everybody, man, it just gets us into trouble every time I think, anyway, that’s just
Damon Pistulka 04:47
my experience. Yeah, yeah. I was just talking about again with another company yesterday. It’s like, listen, the more you can niche down in what you do and who you really do it for the better you’re going to. Form with the work you do, yeah, and the easier it is to speak to those people, yeah?
Curt Anderson 05:06
And even, not even from a standpoint of, you know, and I know the pushback, or the resistance is, you know, oh well, we’re gonna miss this market or that market. We’re just purely talking from a marketing standpoint, yeah, you know, I mean, and it’s not that, hey, that this someone come knocks on your door. Now, if we really want to discipline ourselves, you know there are times that hey, maybe you should say no. Maybe it would be better to align this particular lead or a prospect to a vendor partner, a collaboration partner, because maybe it’d be more in their wheelhouse. But let’s dive into an example here. Damon, yeah, yeah. So let’s,
Damon Pistulka 05:41
I think what you’re saying, though, with these examples, it really is interesting, because you can see by going through this process and following the system, who your best fit people to work with are, and you’ll know why,
Curt Anderson 05:53
Yep, exactly. And so let’s, you know, here’s a manufacturer that probably most of us are familiar with, and I’ve got a couple others I’m going to run like this. But this is our dear friends, Cliff bar, you know, great pro, you know, if you’re a protein person, power bar junkie, you know, this is so we’re familiar with this. Now, what we did is we created, I created a digital game plan, just like, hey, what would, what would this look like for Clif Bar, right? Not that they need our help with marketing, but just, you know, so So the big thing that we want to focus on this first tab we have here. It’s called the so versus the so what and so, you know, if you’re familiar with your your SWAT analysis, your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities and threats, well, hey, when you’re hanging out with Damon and myself, Damon, they have no they have no threats, right? They have no weaknesses. It’s all strengths and opportunities. It’s all like rainbows in your unicorns. But the cool thing is, what this tool does, it goes through and it talks about, like, what are their core strengths? Okay, you know, iconic brand recognition. I love this one here, right? Purpose Driven. And I know Damon like working with your clients like, you know, you do a great job of, like, pulling out like, you know, people love to talk about themselves. So just, you know and shared like their superpower. So just talk about, like, how important it is to dive into this soul exercise right here.
Damon Pistulka 07:06
Well, I every, every time you you hear someone talk about marketing, they talk about your unique value proposition, right? And if you walk up to somebody and ask them that’s in a company about, hey, what’s your unique value proposition? Nine times out of 10 they don’t know. And your unique value proposition, I was just, I just hit me in the head like a brick a while back that this strengths and opportunities exercise is what really allows you to understand. And when you talk to somebody, Hey, what are you best at? What do you really what you know? What do you really love doing? Where do you make the most money. Where do you make people happiest? Get your strengths in there, and then you go, okay, what are market opportunities that you see? And just get those things down, and pretty soon, your unique value proposition comes out of those things, right? And that’s what is, what was really cool about the realization I
Curt Anderson 07:56
had, yeah, you know, and for our friends out there, manufacturers, or maybe this is, you know, we’ve, how many aha moments have we had with prospects or folks that we’re working with? So many take them through here, right? So, for example, again, if you’re familiar with Clif Bar, you know, they have a kid focused product line, you know, it’s very, you know, they’re very prominent targeting young folks. And what a brilliant marketing strategy, right? Yeah, let’s get the the early, you know, I’ve got friends like, you know, their kids are running out earning five K’s, or, you know, 10, 10k races. You know, they’re, you know, grade school, junior high kids, and that’s a great opportunity to catch that. Those folks younger, guess what, when they get in their 20s and 30s, you just, you’ve got a customer for life, right? Yeah. So, you know, that’s why diving into, like, those core strengths and what this tool does, it pulls those strengths out. And a lot of people like, oh, yeah, we do. We are really good at that. I didn’t realize that we’re, you know, things that you take for granted, you know, you might be exceptional at, right?
Damon Pistulka 08:55
Yeah, that’s the thing. I mean, when you start really letting the tool do its work, excuse me. And then you, then you mix the people in with it, and we get the additional pieces of it, get the stuff out that’s not relevant, because, you know, the AI is helping us get started, and then the people is where we refine it and get it really powerful. That’s where the aha moments just go, woof,
Speaker 1 09:18
like a big bomb, yep. Hey, let’s take a water break. Damon, you ready?
Damon Pistulka 09:21
Let’s take a little water break. Right. Here we go.
Curt Anderson 09:25
Alright, alright. Let’s get let’s dive back in. So the next thing is looking at the opportunities. And what I love, if you haven’t read it, great book, I think it was 20 years ago, blue ocean strategies. And what the idea, the concept of this column here. It’s about like, how do we create this blue ocean now, you and I, we had Andy on our show last week from truco machine. I met with Andy and his wife this morning, and he was explaining to his wife what the Blue Ocean Strategy was, man, I was like, just breaming, beaming with pride. And he was talking about like, yes, we’re we don’t want to be like every other. Or CNC shop? Yeah, we want to be we want to separate ourselves. And so they have a bunch of products that they’re aggressively going after. And how can we pursue that here with the cliff bar example, let’s take a look. How about thought leadership and sports nutrition? Now, for our friends out there, do yourself a favor, like you are an expert, yeah? Like nobody knows what you do better than you, right? And you’ve got God given gifts, you’ve got talents, you’ve got extra expertise that you could and should be sharing with other folks. So like, right here for a cliff bar, it’s thought leadership in sports nutrition. Do us a favor, you fill in the blank, right? Thought leadership in XYZ that you are, that are your superpowers, right?
Damon Pistulka 10:44
Yeah, yes, that’s a great example, right?
Curt Anderson 10:47
Building a digital community. I’m going to skip down here. I like this one down here, Damon, you know, what a brilliant idea like, hey, let’s do some seasonal, limited edition flavors. Okay, so, again, here’s an example with Clif Bar. And, you know, again, these are opportunities that you could take a look at Blue Ocean strategies once we launch this live next week, we would be honored for you to take it’s totally, completely free, and we would welcome you to run through this and see like, Hey, what are your core strengths? Maybe there’s something on here that you didn’t realize. And what are some opportunities that you could or should pursue, right?
Damon Pistulka 11:18
Yeah, yeah. And I just think those those opportunities, while some of them hit right, some of them don’t hit quite right. But again, when you’re doing it with somebody that knows a business, you get a third one out of there, or fourth one out of there, fifth one out of there, that’s like that got me thinking. And this is one that I think is even bigger, and it’s so cool to see that happening.
Curt Anderson 11:38
Yep, exactly. So we’ll start. I know we’ve got a ton to cut that week. Oh yeah, let’s hit a couple. We got some friends here that are popping again. Feel free drop us a note. Happy Friday to you. We appreciate you. We never take that lightly. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us here today, or if you’re catching us on a replay. Damon, let’s talk about this last section right here the So, what? How would you describe? So, again, we’re kind of leaving out the weaknesses and the threats. But what does the So, what mean to you?
Damon Pistulka 12:07
Well, the so what i i love this section too. I mean, the strengths is incredible opportunities is but the So, what tells you, really, what your customers probably don’t care a heck of a lot about. And when you think about that, and you look at anything you’re producing, anything you’re talking about, as far as content, I mean producing content, web pages, or sales material, or even what your sales people are talking about. They may not care about it. Why are you talking about it? If they don’t really care about it, question that and think about, how would we be more concise if we remove that from everything we do, right? It’s just cool, right?
Curt Anderson 12:44
Exactly. And the thing is, it also gives some really polite suggestions. I keep, you know, keyword polite suggestions on, like, Hey, we’re looking what this tool does. It goes out and it reads the website and it says, like, hey, you know what? There’s a few opportunities here that are lacking, you know. So like underutilized athletics, athlete stories, you know, our friend Lynn at swoop, wonderful manufacturer, great about Alaska. She, I think she does one of the best jobs of sharing those her customer stories, you know. So customer stories. I just got off the call with a client. Previously, we were interviewing one of their vendor partner, vendor partners. And this woman was absolutely hysterical. She was raving about testimonials about how great this manufacturer is. Like, get out there and get those customer stories, those customer testimonials from people. And then one down here that I wanted to show it had static website experience. You know, that’s even, like our smallest manufacturer, there’s different things that you could potentially do. Is, you could do one of our favorite words, Damon, configurator, right? Yeah, you could have a configurator, let people get on there and, like, build their own product. You could have a survey. You could have a community. So, I mean, there’s a lot of different things. And we see a lot of our our LinkedIn friends that are doing these types of things. And again, these are polite suggestions that you know. I know Cliff bar is absolutely crushing. Cliff bar does not need them, what to what they need to do. But again, just in the spirit of this is how that this tool works, is what are you absolutely best at? Where are their potential? Keyword potential. Blue work, blue ocean opportunities. And what are some things that we are areas of improvement, right?
Damon Pistulka 14:27
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a great start with the digital game plan system, because it really allows you to clarify. And, hey, what are we going to talk about, and what’s our best opportunity here? Right? Exactly. And we’re a unique value proposition comes out of that it’s so important Exactly.
Curt Anderson 14:44
So each tab has a different element of, you know, like segmenting customers. This is, you know what? Damon, let’s, let’s spend a minute on this. Alright, let’s spend a minute on we have this tool called rounding the bases. You were talking about it earlier. So for our friends, that just. Mind again, talk a little bit about segmenting the customers here. What does this look like?
Damon Pistulka 15:05
It usually, when you talk about, like, I said, we have singles, doubles, triples and home runs, it usually is like, okay, a single is a customer, but, you know, they might not be a real regular customer. It might be small, you know, whatever the right designation between these are, and a lot of our customers use dollar figures, right? They go, Okay, this is this, and goes through them, but then we really get a look at who are some of those, and who is it really a segment that we want to go after? I think that’s the most value that we see with clients that goes, Hey, we got this customer, A, B, C and D, but we really want to have more C, and that would be a triple in our case, because they love what we do. We love doing the work they see, the value we see. The relationship is really solid, and then that clarifies all your stuff beyond that, because you go, I don’t care about if a single comes along, we may take it, we may not. If a double comes along, we may take it, we may not. A home run. Might even take second base to the triples, if we really that’s where we love it, and we’re talking to them all the way through the rest of the process. We’re focusing on that one group of customers. Exactly.
Curt Anderson 16:21
I was on a client call this morning with it’s a dog treat manufacturer, wonderful company. And what they’re they’re targeting their singles, targeting their triples. Their singles are the consumers, the people that just love the dogs. They see these folks face to face on a daily basis. And then they’re going after triples. More of, like, that wholesale type customer, yeah? So that’s what we talk about. I’ve got a guy, you know, you he’s been on the show multiple times. You’re friends with him, and he texts me. He’s like, Kirk, man, I’m chasing down a double, you know, yeah? Like, that’s, he’s laser focused on the doubles. We’ve had other clients come on the show and they talk about what bases they’re going after. What’s interesting here is, you know, it’s like, here, like, you know, if you go into Dick’s Sporting Goods and you see Cliff bars, that’s a great customer, you know, you go into, you know, whole foods that you know, that probably needs to move up to a home run. But when you come here to doubles, I absolutely love this. Yeah, we’re talking about one of the core strengths at Cliff bar, are the kids bars. Well, what do they have right here, boys and girls clubs, right? YMCA, what a brilliant, what a brilliant market. You know, I’m at Planet Fitness seven days a week. That’s a great place to have, yeah, you know, Special Olympics, that’d be a wonderful and then Girls on the Run International. So, and what, the cool thing is, it kind of sparks ideas of like, yeah, okay, let’s segment our customers. And now, as you were describing Damon. Now we know, Okay, which one are we going after? You know, like the American, you know, some of these. I mean, you know, like the American hiking society, National Park Foundation, brilliant, brilliant places to go after.
Damon Pistulka 17:52
Yeah, and we’ve even the other cool thing I’ve seen when we go through this with customers is, some might say we really like customers to come in as doubles and grow into triples with us, because that’s the growth base for us too. It’s, it’s a really cool to see that and see how, you know, we come in with a, you know, in the BBB world, they can be, we come into a to a new customer with one project, but we know they’ve got 20 that we could be doing every year for them, or however long it is,
Curt Anderson 18:22
yep, yeah. So alright, so guys, we’re going to let you run, get on with your weekend. And so next week, we’re going to be launching this live. We would welcome, cherish the opportunity of feedback. You know, what do you like, what don’t you like? But this is a tool we are just purely dedicated to helping entrepreneurs in particular, manufacturers, kind of figure out this whole digital marketing thing. And the cool thing is, this is a tool that now you can apply to you yourself, your team, if you’re outsourcing to an agency, now you can, you have this information that you can apply to the agency, just get you that much further down the road.
Damon Pistulka 18:57
Yeah, yeah. You really take ownership, as a business owner, of your marketing strategy.
Curt Anderson 19:02
Yeah, that’s the Damon, what’s our lot? We’re trying to teach our manufacturers how to fish. Is that right? We just want you in power to make better decisions how to connect with those soulmate customers and how to grow your business. So yeah, Damon, any parting thoughts, words of wisdom you want to share as we close out?
Damon Pistulka 19:19
I’m just excited to see this rolling on in this, in this version now, because it’s going to, it’s significantly, takes all the enhancements that we had up to this point, puts them into there. And just excited to hear what people think,
Curt Anderson 19:33
Yep, exactly. And so maybe you know what Damon, maybe next week we’re going to dive into, like, the buyer persona, yeah. So I think that would be great. Yeah, this is a key, key critical. I think it is just so mission critical, of like, understanding who that buyer is, their challenges. I know it’s cliche, like, hey, what’s the pain? But that is, that’s what it’s about. Like, what’s the pain, you know? So I know I could keep everybody here all day. I could go on and on and on. We’re gonna. Up and I’m going to stop sharing. So yeah, Damon, first off, thank you, brother. Appreciate you, and I want to thank everybody out there that joined us today, whether you caught us live or you’re catching us later on a replay. Please connect with Damon on LinkedIn, connect with myself. We’d love to hear what you guys have going on. And next week, we’re going to have our this new software tool live and ready to rock and roll to take your business to the next level.
Damon Pistulka 20:23
Yep, Damon, take us away, brother. All right. Well, thanks everyone for being here. I can see we got some people out there listening. Thank you so much. If you got into this late and you want to learn a little bit more about a marketing roadmap for manufacturers, go back to the beginning. Take a look the B to B TAIL digital game plan is maybe what you need to help you get it, and next week, it’ll be released and and it’s actually a freemium so you can give it a try and run through it all, just what the doctor ordered. My friend, yes, we’ll be back again next week. Everyone, thanks for being here see you.
