Why Selling Less Could Be the Key to Earning More

Why Selling Less Could Be the Key to Earning More written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Chuck Blakeman

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Chuck Blakeman, a successful entrepreneur, business advisor, and author of Sell Less, Earn More. Chuck has built 13 businesses across 10 industries and has worked with top companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. His approach to business growth challenges the traditional sales mindset, proving that relationship marketing and trust-based sales strategies can generate more revenue than aggressive selling.

During our conversation, Chuck shared powerful insights on why selling less can actually lead to earning more. He explains how business owners can shift away from outdated sales techniques and instead focus on client acquisition through relationships, referrals, and networking. His strategies help entrepreneurs break free from transactional selling and build sustainable, long-term business success.

Chuck Blakeman’s fresh take on business development and sales strategy provides a clear roadmap for entrepreneurs looking to earn more with less selling. By prioritizing relationships, referrals, and trust, business owners can ditch aggressive sales tactics and create a more sustainable and enjoyable way to grow their businesses.

Key Takeaways:

• Stop Selling, Start Serving – The best way to grow your business is by building relationships and providing value, not pushing sales.
• Leverage Your Existing Network – Your best clients and referrals often come from people you already know, not cold calls or ads.
• Trust-Based Sales Work Better – Consumers prefer buying from businesses they trust. Building trust leads to higher conversion rates.
• The Role of Recency and Frequency – Staying top of mind through consistent, value-driven communication is key to effective small business marketing.
• Find the Right Partnerships – Instead of chasing individual clients, connect with “lumberjacks”—people who already have access to your ideal customers.
• Shift from Pain Points to Joy Points – Traditional sales focuses on problems; instead, focus on helping customers achieve their goals and aspirations.

Chapters:

• [00:09] Introducing Chuck Blakeman
• [02:27] What Does Sell Less, Earn More Mean?
• [03:35] Why Do Business Owners Hate Selling?
• [06:40] Serve. Don’t Sell.
• [013:54] Staying Recent and Frequent
• [15:21] The Four Quadrants of Relationship Marketing
• [17:21] Getting Started in Relationship Marketing
• [18:54] Relationship Marketing on Modern Platforms

More About Mike Ganino: 

• Check out Chuck Blakeman’s Website
• Connect with Chuck Blakeman on LinkedIn
• Read Sell Less, Earn More: Double Your Income in 90 Days with People You Already Know by Chuck Blakeman

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:00.776)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Chuck Blakeman. He's a successful entrepreneur, bestselling author, TEDx speaker and business advisor. built 13 businesses across 10 industries on four continents and has worked with companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple. Today we're going to talk about his new book, Sell Less, Earn More.

Double your income in 90 days with people you already know. Sounds like an amazing promise. Chuck, welcome to the show.

Chuck (00:32.908)

Thanks, John. Those things always sound like obituaries to me.

John Jantsch (00:35.444)

Well, I've been doing this a long time and somebody found one of mine that like went back to second grade. It was really painful. at any rate, you know, I want to talk about the book, of course, but I can't pass over the 13 businesses, 10 industries, four continents. Do you have like the two minute version of what all that was?

Chuck (00:56.738)

Sure, yeah. In high school, was left-handed, right-brained, ADHD and dyslexic, and they thought I was stupid. They wanted me to be a tinsmith because nobody knew what ADHD and dyslexic was back then. So I went into the Army. While I was in the Army, I stumbled into doing something for somebody else, and they paid me. And fast forward 45 years later, I had started 13 businesses and 10 industries on four continents. And so, yeah, I guess I have something to offer. But when I graduated from high school, I literally thought I'd be the only kid who wouldn't get a job.

John Jantsch (01:26.708)

Well, so what tell us about at least one of those exits. I mean, is it a, you have a, do you have a good sexy story or were they all just all just meat and potatoes?

Chuck (01:34.382)

Yeah, now I'll give you, everybody has good sexy stories. So I'll give you the ugly one because nobody ever gives us, we built a business that we bought it for a million. It was pretty much done. It had been losing business for 10 years. We bought it for a million and we grew it to nine and a half million in two years and had to sell it in a fire sale. Because I didn't understand that when you, the faster you grow, the less money you have. I just assumed that the faster you grow, the more money you have. No, it's called cashflow.

John Jantsch (01:58.982)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Chuck (02:03.822)

So I had, you know, the books, I've written four books now and the books I've read, I same most of them. This is not a book I wrote, this is a life I lived, you you just bleed over this stuff. So that was one of them. And then we had some more successful stories than that one.

John Jantsch (02:13.348)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:19.738)

Awesome. Well, go into the title of the book, sell less earn more sort of counterintuitive a little bit. You want to explain kind of what the core concept you're trying to get across there?

Chuck (02:30.638)

Yes, John, people have accused me of being counterintuitive and I realized I'm actually not, counter logical. It doesn't make sense, but intuitively it does make sense. It's really for this book I wrote because I'm a business owner and I'm a business owner's advocate and I do all kinds of stuff with business owners. This is the anti-sales book specifically written for business owners, not for salespeople. And these are business owners who are looking for a permanent cure to the common cold call. You know, if you want to stop selling,

John Jantsch (02:36.072)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:50.066)

Yeah.

Chuck (03:00.462)

and still earn more. This is the right book for you. So we teach people to do the things I did, because I didn't like selling. It was a rude awakening for me to wake up one morning. If you're making chairs and they're piling up in your basement, you figure out, oh no, I actually have to sell these darn things. And you end up doing something you didn't want to do. Very few business owners go into business to want to sell. So we teach them how to get out of sales and to stop doing it by building relationships with people they already know.

John Jantsch (03:15.828)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (03:31.252)

So for the, you you hit on a very key point. A lot of people didn't go into business because they were great at selling and actually end up saying, I hate that part of it. Is there a reason they hated and does it really kind of lie in the way that sales is traditionally thought about and experienced and taught?

Chuck (03:49.102)

Yeah, I love your book and I love your approach to things. Absolutely. We inherited this funny thing from the industrial age called selling. Before the factory system, we produced what we needed. By 1850, most factories were producing way more than they needed. So they had to invent selling to sell you stuff you didn't need. And we call it stabbing strangers with your business card. You're doing all this kind of crazy stuff to try and gin up sales that people don't need. Welcome to consumerism.

John Jantsch (03:57.417)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:11.806)

Yeah.

Chuck (04:18.74)

Absolutely. goes back to the whole idea that we we were sold this bill of goods, target marketing, selling to strangers, pitching pain points. Why don't we find somebody's joy point instead? A cold calls, know, cold calls, the conversation. This is my favorite. hear this all the time. I can, someone very proudly will say to me, I contacted my database. Why don't you connect with a few people you know?

John Jantsch (04:26.398)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:42.216)

Right.

Chuck (04:47.374)

There's a message in those two statements. One is transactional and the other is relational. So we've inherited a transactional view of business and sales is the worst aberration of that.

John Jantsch (04:50.324)

Sure.

John Jantsch (05:00.116)

So I work with lot of consultants, agencies that are, you know, they need three or four more clients or maybe they're just getting started. And they're very drawn to the, can have a thousand emails and I can automate a funnel and I can use AI to contact all these people. And I do the same thing. I say, why don't you just pick up the phone and call five people and see what happens. But people don't want to do that. They'd rather sit through agonizing days of setting up a funnel.

Chuck (05:18.83)

You

John Jantsch (05:27.208)

you know, then to actually reach out. how do you get people past that?

Chuck (05:30.658)

Yes, so would I. I mean, most business owners, they don't want to talk to strangers. They love talking to customers, but they don't want to talk to strangers. Go to networking events. Nobody wants to do that. So how do we get them past the idea? Well, they get themselves past it. Usually they come to the end of themselves either in time or in money because it takes a bucket load of money and time to get all that stuff moving for you. There's two ways to find clients.

John Jantsch (05:55.956)

Yeah, yeah.

Chuck (05:59.926)

You can buy them, which is extremely expensive in time and money, or you can pick up the phone and say hello to people. But the key here, John, for me is I'm not asking you to go find people you don't know that I hate that. What if you could go to a friend and talk to them? call it finding your lumberjacks. What if you, instead of going to the networking forest and finding the next tree and doing all the seasoning you have to do in that relationship, what if you found somebody who'd been to the forest?

John Jantsch (06:12.116)

Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chuck (06:28.448)

and had 20 years worth of trees in their database, and they could see the value of giving their customers to you. Make friends with that person you already know and show them the benefit, and off you go.

John Jantsch (06:39.346)

Yeah, yeah. So, so...

There are lot of people that that started business and, you know, they really, again, I coach them. was like, look at your contacts in your database. That's your, like, you got a hundred people in there. Probably that's where you start. But then they kind of come to this point of like, yeah, okay. They know me, but like, how do I warm them up? How do I get, how do I get a conversation that actually has something to do with maybe them purchasing or maybe them referring? How do you, how do you do that? How do you get that, that contact who's not really expecting you to call them and talk to you about your new business?

Chuck (07:12.486)

Yeah, the first, the overriding principle of the book, Sell Less Earn More is serve, don't sell, which you're all over that. And we teach people specific ways to get involved in that. We have the four buying questions. When you meet with someone individually, I challenge business owners to never talk about their business again in a one-to-one unless they are asked. And almost always I'm asked because I have four buying questions where I'm,

John Jantsch (07:18.664)

Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck (07:41.888)

asking them about things that have nothing to do with business. I'm showing interest as a human being. And you know, trust is our number one asset. If you don't have trust, you're done. So asking for buying questions, how did you get into this business? Where is it taking you? What do you want out of it? And just simple things like that will give them the idea that maybe this person actually cares about me as a human being. The guard goes down. Jeffrey Gitmer made this famous, but was in 1930s. People were saying nobody wants to buy.

Nobody wants to be sold, everybody wants to buy. The four buying questions flip the script. Don't talk about your business. Ask them about them as human beings or about their business. Show interest. know, Stephen Covey, seek first to understand rather than be understood. I didn't make this stuff up. But we get all that and we all say, I understand, but we don't do it.

John Jantsch (08:29.555)

Yeah.

Chuck (08:35.447)

What if we actually went in with four buying questions and we didn't we never we never talked about our business again Unless we were asked I guarantee you will make more money

John Jantsch (08:44.436)

Do you want to share those? I mean, are they set questions or they it's really.

Chuck (08:47.438)

Yeah, there's some questions. they're really different for individuals, based on whether you're talking to consumers or businesses. I'll give you the business to business version. Past is the first question. So you can say something like, so tell me, John, what motivated you to leave your job and get into this business? That's the past. That's something John hasn't thought about for years. It serves John. Why in the world did I do this? then the second one is exactly.

John Jantsch (09:11.604)

I couldn't get a job, that's why.

Chuck (09:15.79)

And the second one is the future. You got that right. The second one is the future. So John, if this is why you got into business, what do you want out of it? What's your personal long-term desire for this thing? Most business owners never do that. They just figure out, if I make a bucket load of money, somehow I'll be happy. And we know it doesn't work. So that serves them to ask that question. And then the third question is present. So past, future, and then present. If this is why you got into it and this is what you want out of it, what's the one thing?

We call it bottlenecks. What's the one thing standing in your way right now to get you to that place that you want to be when you say, this business has really served me? Most business owners are too busy in the day to day to even think about what is the one strategic thing I need to do? I need more customers. I need more space. I need better training. What is the one thing that's holding me back right now? And then the third, fourth one, if you ever get to, because by then usually they're asking you questions. But if you get to the fourth one, the fourth one is, John, who's your perfect client?

John Jantsch (10:10.568)

Right.

Chuck (10:10.794)

And how could I find, because I want to know who that is so I can send you some of those. So those are the four buying questions. My friend John was a wealth manager. He took our training. We have we've been doing this for 20 years. He took our our fast track sales business development training course. And he had at the time he started he had 2200 clients and he was taking home a quarter million dollars a year. Now he has under 20 clients and he takes home way over a million dollars a year.

John Jantsch (10:37.224)

Yeah, yeah.

Chuck (10:38.062)

because he took the four buying questions and he started using that instead of, me show you what I got. Stop me when you see something like, I got something up the sleeve. got something up. Nobody cares.

John Jantsch (10:44.66)

Yeah. So tell me, how much permission do you need for those questions? And the reason I ask that is, you know, I have a lot of what I would, I mean, we all now have very, we all have networks of people who we know, but you know, we've never met, we're connected on LinkedIn, maybe, you know. And so then I get that question where somebody says, what are you most excited about? I'm like,

Chuck (11:03.426)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:12.296)

I'm not telling you what I'm excited about. I mean, how much permission do we need to get into what might feel a little more personal?

Chuck (11:19.406)

Well, and that is an intuitive question because you have to read the person across from you and say, is this a person who gets excited about sharing that stuff? So you might have to go a little slower. But in general, I've never found anybody who didn't want to talk about themselves in some way. So even if they, when you ask them why did you get into this business, they won't tell you because they couldn't find a job. But they will tell you some other really good stuff about why they got into it because then that's fine. So tell me whatever you want.

John Jantsch (11:34.194)

Yeah.

Chuck (11:47.81)

This can sound like an interrogation if you don't respond. So I'm always ready to say, well, let me tell you how I got into business and with somebody who's uncomfortable, I'll do that first. And in one of them, I will say, because I couldn't get a job. And it just opens them up. So I have to be transparent so they will.

John Jantsch (11:50.568)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I think you really hit on this and not everybody has the emotional quotient for this, quite frankly, but the whole goal is to serve, is not to sell, right? And if you're coming from that point of view, it eventually comes across, doesn't it?

Chuck (12:19.842)

Yeah, know, people think I make some of this stuff up and then I remind them, Zig Ziglar, 1970s, you know, if you help enough other people get to their goals, you'll get to yours. You really believe that we all give lip service to these things, but I can show you hundreds, thousands of business owners who have done these things have actually finally actually practiced this with passion and found that, yeah, you know, it actually does work if I just serve other people. I had a one-to-one with a woman once who I was going to do my dog and pony show and she

John Jantsch (12:24.466)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chuck (12:49.922)

She showed up and said, hey, I gotta find a babysitter. We just lost our babysitter for our 20th anniversary and it's four hours from now. We spent 45 minutes finding her a babysitter because that's what she needed. She didn't need my dog and pony show. I never talked to her again. A year later, her sister called me and she became a client for two years. I made a lot of money from that meeting because I served the other person. Do we really believe that that's the way to go?

John Jantsch (13:00.808)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:15.144)

Yeah. And I think it really takes, it really takes not only that serving, but a long-term mindset too, right? I you, you, you, you have seen, this play out. You knew at some time in the future, this babysitting job was going to pay off, didn't you?

Chuck (13:20.778)

It... You got it Johnny.

Chuck (13:30.274)

Well, and I know your stuff well, but I don't know if you actually ever said this, but you live it out. You are a you live out the idea of long term decision making, making decisions based on what will actually help you in the long term, not today. And boy, when we take on that that approach, it is actually harder for the first year because that's what people think. I'm going to start to doubt if I actually take note, you'd be surprised. But boy, is it freeing to actually think in the long term and to work with people based on what is their long term

That's my definition of business love, is putting the interest of the other person, the long-term best interest of that person first.

John Jantsch (14:01.182)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:07.764)

So a lot of times when you're having a conversation with your network, they don't need anything today. They can't think of anybody that they could refer you to. Where does this role of like staying top of mind recency frequency? mean, how, how big are part of that?

Chuck (14:19.042)

There you go. You just know that we use those two words, recency and frequency, to build any relationship, whether it's with your dog, your pet orca whale, or your wife, or your friend, you need to be recent and frequent. How recently did you talk to me and how frequently? So we have to have drip systems and we have to have drip systems they actually want to open.

John Jantsch (14:35.304)

Yeah.

Chuck (14:42.594)

So it's not about me. I have a realtor who sends me something on a regular basis and I open it because it's always interesting, fun stuff that I would want to hear. It's not how great am I as a realtor. And so we have to figure that out and do the recency and frequency. And you put together a simple little drip system. We got Microsoft as a client, $3 million a year client, because for a year and a half, I tickled the guy at Microsoft who was my contact.

John Jantsch (14:42.696)

Yeah, right.

Chuck (15:09.23)

with everything from a phone call to a press release to once in a while coming out to visit him. And he called me one day and said, hey, I got this press release from you yesterday. I'm glad I did, because I'd forgotten all about you. It's like, I've been pinging you forever, but if you're not recent and frequent, it's not going to work. So you got to have that as part of your deal.

John Jantsch (15:20.648)

Right.

John Jantsch (15:25.704)

Plus, mean, you we're all overloaded with information. So it's like, what, what, why one, why did one thing work? Right. It's because they were ready to hear it that day. Right. Yeah. So you have actually, and I love it when people have frameworks for quadrants of marketing that you talk about, when it comes to relationship marketing, you want to kind of unpack that idea for people.

Chuck (15:28.397)

Yes.

Chuck (15:32.94)

Yeah. Yes.

Chuck (15:47.202)

Yeah, so quadrant number one is advertising. That's what the big boys use. And quadrant number two is direct mail. Those two are more, or direct marketing. Those two are more the purview of people with a lot of money and not a lot of time. So you can buy a gecko or a duck or a funny comedian and put them on the airways for millions and millions of dollars for years. And we just love, we fall in love with that insurance company because we fell in love with fill in the blank, that you the guy.

John Jantsch (15:50.792)

Yep.

John Jantsch (15:56.254)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:15.57)

Yeah.

Chuck (16:16.952)

Good luck with that. I don't have that kind of money as a business owner. And the second one is direct marketing. That one I can do a little bit more of and a lot more of in some ways, but still it's expensive. The third quadrant is public relations. We told a guy who wanted to do rugby vacations, set up rugby vacations with a guy and his wife and 30 guys and go on a 10 day vacation in Brazil and play two or three rugby games. We told him, go kick a rugby ball across America.

He figured out he could get $150,000 in sponsors, and it would take him like three months to kick the ball across, and he'd get news in every town. It's paid marketing if you do it right. But the one that really works for us is what we call, everybody calls relationship marketing. That's the one that costs the least amount of money and the most amount of time. But I say this all the time, and you say it in your stuff, you just don't say it with this phrase, the closer you get to a hug,

John Jantsch (16:55.694)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:02.088)

Yeah, yeah.

Chuck (17:15.202)

the more likely you are to sell something. So sit across the table from somebody and watch what happens. And again, don't do it one customer at a time. Find the lumberjack who has all those customers who will just open their database to you. You got 100 people in your database, you're going to wear them out. He or she has 300, and you have two or three of those, you got a thousand person database. Let's just do it that way. Make friends with a few people.

John Jantsch (17:15.432)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:31.368)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:39.796)

So let's say I am a somebody getting started maybe in a new business. And I come to you and I say, look, I want to get this. I love what you're talking about. I want to get this going. Like what's the checklist? Like what are the 10 things I need to do to, to kind of set this in motion? I know it's not going to happen overnight, but how do I set it in motion?

Chuck (17:59.15)

Yeah, so we have a, these are all things I did to build my businesses. We didn't make anything up to sell on the internet or any of that kind of stuff. We just feel like people need a specific set of tools. So we talk about what we call the lumberjack buying system. It's a simple way to alliterate the three different places in your database that a person might be living. They're either a new contact or you're in a conversation or they're on the fire or they're a new client.

John Jantsch (18:07.08)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:16.456)

Mm-hmm.

Chuck (18:27.758)

And then things like gold veins, where you can show up on a regular basis and you'll see the same people over and over again, very different than networking. And they're all the ideal clients of yours. Catalyst events, tier three listening, the four buying questions, the four walking in commitments. So there's some mindset things that people have to do to shift out of the industrial age mindset guilt trip that we've been giving, you stabbing people with their business cards. That's mindset stuff. And then there's a few simple tools.

John Jantsch (18:36.243)

Yeah.

Eh-heh-heh.

Chuck (18:57.486)

that people have. We have a 10 week training course that we use and there's about six tools that we give people over those 10 weeks. And you don't have to use all of them. This is one of the other problems with sales is that we give people these really rigid sales processes that are built for nobody or 70 % and not for me.

John Jantsch (19:08.092)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:16.744)

How do some of the newish, been around for a while now, but newish platforms like LinkedIn, how do they play into this game?

Chuck (19:27.551)

Yeah, well, you know, 10 years ago, somebody in one of our courses said, I'm going to use LinkedIn to develop my relationships. Right after I had said the closer you get to a hug, the more likely you to tell something. but she went in 10 weeks, she doubled her income by just talking to people on LinkedIn that she knew in alphabetical order, and she didn't get past E.

John Jantsch (19:39.132)

Yeah. Right, right.

John Jantsch (19:52.446)

Yeah.

Chuck (19:53.166)

Now, if you looked at what she had, she had a lot of good existing relationships on LinkedIn. So it wasn't a cold call. She was talking to people she already knew. So it doesn't matter what medium you're on. I made $100,000 plus in about a year and a half off of Twitter 15 years ago. So you can do that, but it's still the same principles. Nothing changes. The closer you get to a hug, the more likely you are to sell something. Serve, don't sell. Tier three listening, it's all the same.

John Jantsch (19:58.612)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:22.708)

Chuck, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. there a place you'd invite people to connect to you to learn more about sell less earn more?

Chuck (20:29.516)

Yeah, they can find it on Amazon, sell less, more. They can also go to 3to5club.com, the number 3-T-O-5 club.com, or just find me chuck at cranksetgroup.com. I also have a web page, chuckblakeman.com. So any of that stuff, if you look up Chuck Blakeman, you're going to find me, unfortunately, if that's your thing.

John Jantsch (20:31.614)

me.

John Jantsch (20:48.724)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road,

Chuck (20:55.0)

Look forward to it, John. Thank you.

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The Zero-Click Internet: What It Means for Your Marketing Strategy

The Zero-Click Internet: What It Means for Your Marketing Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Rand Fishkin

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research software company. Rand is a well-known expert in search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing, with deep insights into the evolving landscape of Google search and the rise of the zero-click internet.

During our conversation, Rand explained how zero-click searches—where users find answers directly on Google without clicking on external links—are reshaping SEO strategy, content marketing, and online visibility. With 60% of searches now ending without a click, businesses must rethink their marketing strategy to reach audiences where they already engage—whether on social media, Google’s own properties, or other digital platforms.

Rand’s insights emphasize the need for marketers to adapt to zero-click trends, build a presence across multiple channels, and rethink traditional SEO trends to succeed in today’s digital landscape.

Key Takeaways:

• Zero-click searches are growing – 60% of Google searches now end without a click, changing how businesses gain online traffic.
• SEO strategy must evolve – Instead of chasing organic traffic, brands should focus on influencing audiences where they are—on social platforms, communities, and third-party sites.
• Google’s algorithm prioritizes engagement – Google is keeping more users within its ecosystem, using featured snippets, AI-generated answers, and instant results.
• Content marketing needs a shift – Creating content that thrives on Google, social media, and other platforms without requiring clicks is the new game.
• Online marketing is more than traffic – Success is about brand visibility, trust, and engagement rather than just website visits.

Chapters:

• [00:09] Introducing Rand Fishkin
• [01:07] What is Zero Click?
• [02:11] How Has Zero Click Impacted Search
• [06:33] How Should SEO Professionals Adapt?
• [08:34] How Do Content-Reliant Businesses Survive?
• [14:30] Is Google Dead?
• [16:50] Making the Best of Attribution

More About Rand Fishkin: 

Check out Rand Fishkin’s Website
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John Jantsch (00:00.972)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He's a co-founder and CEO of Spark Toro, an audience research software company and indie game developer at Snack Bar Studio. We probably ought to talk about indie games, Passionate about helping marketers, he shares insights through writing speaking and his book Lost and Founder, previously co-founded Moz and inbound.org and co-authored the Art of SEO.

He's going to talk about, we are going to talk today about zero click. something that I said off air, you were probably getting tired of talking about, but still a lot of people want to hear about. Welcome to

Rand Fishkin (00:43.672)

Great to be here, John. No, I don't think people are tired of talking about zero click. I think there's a lot of people who, don't totally know what it is and B, are feeling the effects of it, even if they're not super into the tactical and strategic world of zero click.

John Jantsch (00:54.092)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:00.216)

So having said that, maybe we ought to define that's what we're talking about, right? And maybe even talk about, mean, you've been following Google for, I don't know, since Google was born, right? So, you know, when did it start showing up?

Rand Fishkin (01:13.356)

Yeah. So, the term I believe was coined by initially Gabriel Weinberg at DuckDuckGo. That was the first instance I could find of it. In 2011, Gabriel described Google as having these zero click searches and zero click answers. So this is the first sort of appearance of a zero click concept in the marketing world. And a few years later, I did a study, with Jumpshot, which was, which is a now defunct

clickstream data provider. And JumpShot worked with me to see what percent of all Google searches ended without a click. Essentially, they stayed inside Google's ecosystem either by opening up the Google Maps app or getting their answer right at the top of the results through those instant answers or featured snippets or now AI overviews.

John Jantsch (02:04.896)

Right, right, right. So, I guess maybe you're going to say it. The zero click meaning that somebody goes and they don't go away. They get their answer and they don't leave Google, right? Zero.

Rand Fishkin (02:15.918)

So that, yeah, and that was the initial idea of like, oh, there's these zero click searches and search marketing might be changing as a result. And maybe we should think about rather than trying to get traffic, simply provide the answer to the searcher, right? To the user. In 2019, Google answered just under half of all searches without a click. like 49 % or something. Fast forward to last year, I just did this study again with Datos.

John Jantsch (02:26.253)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (02:45.07)

And that number is now 60%. So 60 % of searches are answered without a click, which as a user is super convenient. And as a publisher is terrifying.

John Jantsch (02:57.026)

Well, that goes to a point. mean, there are some that are saying this is an evil plot by Google, but really it's like behavior, right? I mean, it's like, this is what the user wants. I know as somebody who's trying to get a quick, I want to know what time the ball game starts. You know, I don't need to go to ESPN's website, right? And read the history of football before I get the time, right?

Rand Fishkin (03:17.326)

That's exactly right. If you want to know how old Paul Rudd is, or you want to see which channel you can watch SNL 50 on, or you're trying to figure out what are the ingredients in Moroccan spices, you know what? Google can just answer those things for you, and it is incredibly convenient. So zero-click searches started with Google, but they did not end there. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit.

YouTube, TikTok, Slack, every single platform realized that they could keep more people on their websites and their platforms if they stopped sending traffic out. And so, Twitter was one of the early adoptees of this. algorithm, this is probably 2016, 17, their algorithm started biasing against links. If you included a link in a tweet, Twitter would limit the reach of that tweet.

John Jantsch (03:47.746)

Tick tock.

John Jantsch (04:00.716)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (04:15.542)

Substantially compared to a tweet that did not contain a link that's true on Facebook as well It's true on linkedin as well. You can see it in subreddits where moderators and reddit themselves started down voting and and stopping the promotion of Reddit submissions that contained a link youtube started Minimizing the description field so that it would hide any url external url link that would take you off of youtube

John Jantsch (04:40.961)

Ehh.

Rand Fishkin (04:43.31)

So every single platform is doing this over and over. And my colleague, Amanda Natividad, when she joined SparkToro, what was that, 2022, she sort of came up with this idea that zero click is not just about search, it's about all platforms. The zero click internet is here. And as a result, the only thing to do is to create zero click content and do zero click marketing. Influence people in the places they're already paying attention

John Jantsch (05:11.52)

Right. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (05:12.876)

rather than demanding that they come to your platform and requiring traffic to be your only KPI.

John Jantsch (05:18.806)

Yeah. And, you know, lot of the people, the sky is falling, you know, looking at the results. was a pretty, sexy headline that HubSpot had lost 72 % of their traffic or something like that. But can we say that a percentage of that, maybe a large percentage was kind of garbage traffic anyway? I mean, it wasn't intent traffic. was like, they published a listicle and somebody went to that cause they wanted the list, but they didn't want anything to do with HubSpot.

Rand Fishkin (05:43.416)

Well, John, I don't know if you did what I did as soon as I saw that headline, but I went and looked up HubSpot stock price and their latest earnings report. And guess what? Record highs, right? So HubSpot and a whole bunch of other platforms, I did a whole blog post and a video about this. They are indicative of a new trend that zero click marketing is.

John Jantsch (05:47.564)

Heheheh, Potter.

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (06:11.424)

almost certainly at the head of, is traffic down, revenue up. If your traffic goes down, but your revenue goes up, should you be pissed at your marketing team? Or should you celebrate the fact that they are finding opportunities in a zero click internet world for your message and your influence to reach the right audience and attract the right customers? I think it's the latter.

John Jantsch (06:34.56)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so you started to hint at what to do now. If you're especially SEO folks, know, or I mean, they, they'd kind of dialed in the game, right? So now like, what's the new game? I mean, for SEO folks, if you were advising a group of SEO folks, you know, talking, doing a keynote, you know, what would you be telling them that they need to be doing how they need to be changing their model?

Rand Fishkin (06:55.82)

Yeah, I'm actually, I'm giving a at SMX Munich to a couple thousand people next month. And the topic, John, you'll like this is called, it's the end of traffic as we know it. And I feel fine. And the basic premise here is that, look, if you're an SEO, some of you will have no choice. Your boss, your team, your client.

John Jantsch (07:00.748)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:09.474)

Yeah, great. That's awesome.

Rand Fishkin (07:20.302)

They're going to say, I don't care what Rand Fishkin says. I don't care what's going on in Google. I don't care about zero click marketing. You get me traffic. That's your job. You know what? Okay. You're going to have to focus on the few keywords that send traffic and sort of the 40 % of searchers that click and you know, the platforms that still do send some traffic, that kind of thing. But for everyone else, I would urge you to break out of this mindset that everything has to be about SEO, right? That the classic SEO is the only thing that you're good at.

John Jantsch (07:45.484)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (07:49.01)

SEOs, at least when I was an SEO, you know, seven years ago now, it was not just about ranking in Google, right? There was lots of things that you'd have to do as part of that. Things around accessibility of your website, sure, but also placement of content on third-party websites and pitching and essentially, yeah, a public relations job, right? It is a PR job. You're trying to create content and a message that people want to amplify and get that message amplified in the places they pay attention.

John Jantsch (08:06.68)

Authority, yeah, Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Rand Fishkin (08:19.638)

I'm not sure exactly what the industry is going to end up calling that. Maybe they'll call it PR. Maybe they'll call it the new form of influencer marketing. Maybe they'll call it content placement or offsite content marketing. I don't really care. I don't care what that's called. What I do care about is you should do it because it works.

John Jantsch (08:37.974)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you you made a point about why everybody's so fixed on SEO. I think for a lot of SEO folks, it was easy, cheap traffic. And in some cases, easy, cheap conversions and business. And so I think we got lazy. And I think that to me, that was a big part of it. But what about that business that is all about trust and authority? Content was huge for them to drive, you know, folks to their website.

couldn't buy ads, ads were useless to them. What is that business, like a professional services business? How do they survive in this

Rand Fishkin (09:13.038)

I look, I think whenever I realize my video is getting a little fuzzy and Riverside's giving me a funny message about that, but my internet's fast and my device is running fast, so I don't know. I'm just gonna go and hope that the recording catches it correctly. The reality is when your business model gets disrupted, you either decide to embrace the change that's coming,

John Jantsch (09:19.426)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (09:42.41)

Or you face the consequences. And I think the consequences are not nothing. It's not all going to die. SEO is going to go away. That's not what's happening. It's just going to become a lower growth rate industry or even a shrinking industry over time as CMOs and CEOs and boards of directors wake up to the fact that the opportunity in organic types of marketing might lie elsewhere, i.e. influencing people in the places where they already play.

John Jantsch (10:10.998)

Yeah. The new sexy term is AIO. How much do we need to pay attention to that?

Rand Fishkin (10:16.878)

it, it varies quite a bit. If you're in B2B, especially B2B tech and you're selling to other B2B techies, the answer is you probably need to pay some attention to it. There was a great report from SEM rush, recently where they looked at the clickstream data. like clickstream data a lot. think it really tells the story accurately.

They looked at 80 million different click streams of people who visited and used ChatGPT, and they analyzed what they did with the platform, the prompts that they put in, all that kind of stuff. What I found quite interesting there is 70 % of those prompts had no corollary at Google. So you could not perform the task that was asked of ChatGPT in Google's ecosystem

John Jantsch (11:05.868)

Hmm.

Rand Fishkin (11:13.55)

outside of Gemini whatsoever, right? This is an AI type of task. It's like saying how much market share is Microsoft Excel taking from Google search? What? None. Like that's people are doing different things with that. Chat GPT is taking 30 % away from a search engine, right? Or, or adding it to it, right? Those are, those, those are people who are using it for that replacement thing. But I think the answer here is every single business.

John Jantsch (11:15.948)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:35.436)

Right, yeah.

Rand Fishkin (11:43.2)

Every sector needs to figure out whether its customers and audience are using large language models and AI tools to perform search like tasks inside their specific ecosystem. you know, not to promote spark Toro, but I, I don't know of another place you can do this, but you can inside spark Toro. what that's what we do with clickstream data, right? You can go and you can search for, you know, my audience is science fiction writers or interior designers or.

you know, painters or landscaping professionals, or I want to find people who search for backyard gardens. And, Spartora will then tell you in the AI and tools section, which platforms they're using and how much more or less than normal. So you could see, for example, I ran a search recently for, people who do custom decking, like for their backyards. They don't use AI tools very much, right? That's not, that's not their goal, but.

John Jantsch (12:34.583)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:37.952)

Right, right, right.

Rand Fishkin (12:40.396)

If you look for people who are searching for B2B CRM software, well, yeah, they are using ChakGPT and Gemini and Kaggy and all these different AI tools, much more than average. You probably need to pay attention to large language model optimization.

John Jantsch (12:58.334)

That's a great, great point. I've seen a real divide between the idea of local businesses versus national or B2B, like you mentioned, like that Decker, you know, that you talked about that's, that's fixing people's homes. I mean, he's probably got people in his geography or he or she that's looking for them and you know, Google maps and some of those tools are still their friend, right?

Rand Fishkin (13:20.414)

Yeah, absolutely. this, I mean, I don't know what to tell you, John. Like there's, there's still people who just as they did in 1720 or 1950 or 2001, their primary resource for which person am I going to use to build my deck is they ask their neighbor, they ask their friend, right? And that, is a source of influence that is influenceable via different means than, you know,

John Jantsch (13:41.59)

Yep. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (13:50.072)

highway billboard or a Google search or an AI tool or a social media platform. And so your job as a marketer is to figure out the sources of your audience influence and be present in those places, hopefully commensurate with how much they use them.

John Jantsch (14:07.98)

Yeah. Yeah. And dedicated what limited resources you have to the best ones, right? Now, so another sexy headline is Google's dead. So is their dominance, you know, is their dominance going to fade? mean, obviously, the cash cow depends on people going to their homepage and clicking on ads instead of getting answers.

Rand Fishkin (14:14.219)

Exactly.

Rand Fishkin (14:20.325)

you

Rand Fishkin (14:32.512)

Yeah. So, it's funny. I was just asked about this by some reporters. and I don't like to give opinion based answers here, right? Google's getting worse. I ran this search and I got a bunch of junk in my results where 10 years ago when I ran this search, I used to get good stuff. I don't like those types of anecdotal, replies and responses. I don't trust them. The thing I trust is data at scale. So

What I would look at if I were a reporter trying to answer the question, is Google dying? Is Google getting worse? Is, are there more or less people searching on Google than there were last year at the same time? Are there more or fewer searches per searcher than there were last year at this time? The answer to both of those, according to some research that I hope to publish in the next couple of weeks actually, is no.

Google grew about 10 % in terms of searches per searcher last year, and it grew in terms of number of total searchers last year. You don't have to believe me, by the way, or Datos' numbers. If you prefer, you can look at what Sundar Pichay said in the earnings call, the Google earnings call two weeks ago. He said the same thing, and our data bears it out. I don't always trust Google to tell us the truth, but in this case,

all the data sources agree, if Google is getting worse, then the only logical response is, well, if they're getting worse, everything else, all the alternatives must be even worse because people are still using them more and more.

John Jantsch (16:10.616)

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think people under or forget, you know, they're more than just that search box as well. You know, I pay Google a hundred bucks every month to use Gmail and Sheets and Slides and all those kinds of things too. they're an ecosystem way beyond their ad network.

Rand Fishkin (16:31.244)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But, but I want to be clear, I'm not talking about their earnings report in terms of their dollar, you know, of, of growth. I'm talking about right growth in, in raw searches.

John Jantsch (16:38.38)

Yeah. Just searches, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So another topic that, and this is right up your alley, so I'm inviting you to talk about Spark Toro here, is that attribution is just getting harder and harder. And yet, as I listen to your talk, it's more important maybe than ever. Like, where are your people hanging out and actually reading stuff and how do you find them? So how do you advise businesses to really kind of arm themselves with better attribution?

Rand Fishkin (17:12.578)

Gosh.

John Jantsch (17:14.168)

Oh, I asked a hard question. like that. Well, that was my entire intent, so I did well.

Rand Fishkin (17:16.416)

Well, here's the problem, John. You've set me up once again to like tee up my own software and I really, try not to. But you know, you know, I don't like to be self-promotional. Okay. First off, there are, there are several ways to do this. Some of them good, some of them bad. One of the ones that a lot of people use that I really don't like is they do post-consumer surveys.

John Jantsch (17:30.874)

hahahahah

Rand Fishkin (17:45.998)

So this is, you you just bought this pair of shoes from Nike, Nike sends you an email and they ask you, how did you find us? Or they ask you at the end of the checkout process, you know, how did you learn about these shoes today? What made you buy from us? And people will give answers that are incomplete, often inaccurate. And if you're a marketer, you're only ever going to get answers from channels and sources that you already reach. So you will never know.

about the ones that didn't send you traffic, right? This is a huge bias problem. I cannot recommend enough against asking people where they heard about you and then using that to determine your marketing budget. is just logic. You you have failed logic 101 in college and you're going to get kicked out of the class.

John Jantsch (18:20.973)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:28.536)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:35.99)

Well, and you're also going to pay Facebook a lot more money because everybody says they saw your Facebook ad, right?

Rand Fishkin (18:41.006)

It depends on the sector. So we tried this. of my, one of my favorite stories, John, is early in the spark after spark Charles launch, we tried this with one of our customers. We asked them, this is a consumer brand in the food industry. So they like sell a food product. I don't have permission to mention who they are, but they sell a food product direct to consumers. And we said, Hey, can you try something for us? Would you put these two? think it was like Martha Stewart and I wasn't Guy Fieri, but it was some other like.

notable food person in the food world. We asked them to put that in their dropdown list of places where people had heard about them. Yeah. Guess what, John? Those people had never mentioned the brand. They had never talked about them. And 30 % of the customers said, yeah, that's where I heard about you. So just, you you're getting terrible data, like absolutely terrible data. the, the second one, the one that I do.

John Jantsch (19:09.986)

Food. Foodie. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:23.01)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:30.168)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (19:38.072)

quite like is to look at, broadly speaking, if you use a competitive intelligence platform and you can see where traffic is going to your competitors, that can make reasonable sense, right? So similar web is a good resource for that. Obviously, Spark Toro offers that type of data as well from a competitive perspective. I think SEM rush, the folks I mentioned who did that research.

John Jantsch (19:51.32)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (19:55.81)

Yes.

Rand Fishkin (20:05.676)

I think they might have some of that in their platform, but it might be search centric. So be careful. You're not just getting biased by Google stuff. and then the, you know, the absolute best one, the absolute best way to do this is learn lockpicking, get the home addresses of all your customers break into their houses, steal their own, get the phone unlock code, and then look at everything that they read, browse, watch, subscribe to follow that of course.

John Jantsch (20:25.016)

Yep.

Rand Fishkin (20:33.556)

super illegal, highly unethical. have, I, yeah, that's right. Yeah. You got a lot of competition for that. but, but the next closest thing is essentially clickstream data, which is, you know, a panel of users and the providers look at every URL that's visited. And then you can sort of, take a broad group of people and extrapolate what a general population does.

John Jantsch (20:36.066)

Plus, Alexa's already doing it anyway, so.

Rand Fishkin (21:02.094)

That's what we do at Spark Toro. so, you if you want to see, you can type in your website or a competitor's website or a search term that people use in Google or, a descriptor that people use in their buys. And then you can see what websites, what topics, what social media platforms they use more or less than average. and that can, that can be a good way to sort of get a sense of, Hey, you know, lot of our customers are using.

I don't read it and we're not there at all. A lot of our customers are on TikTok or LinkedIn or Pinterest or they're using ChatGPT or they're using Gemini and we're not in those places. We should probably be making investments there.

John Jantsch (21:35.702)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:49.876)

Yeah. Well, Rand, we're, we've run out of time. I appreciate you dropping by. Uh, we've mentioned sparktoro.com a couple of times anywhere else that you'd invite people to connect with you and learn more about your work.

Rand Fishkin (22:00.504)

Sure, well, you know, at the start of our chat today, you mentioned Snapbar Studio. So folks are interested in an indie video game where you get to play an Italian chef in the 1960s. You can check that out at snapbarstudio.com. And who isn't? It's not live yet, but give us about 18 months, and there'll be an early access version on Steam.

John Jantsch (22:14.2)

And who isn't?

John Jantsch (22:24.408)

Awesome, awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Rand Fishkin (22:29.838)

Yeah, I look forward to it, John. Take care of yourself. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (22:32.098)

All right, bye now.

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Weekend Favs February 22nd

Weekend Favs February 22nd written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one I took on the road.

• Zcal is a scheduling tool that allows individuals and teams to book meetings effortlessly. Zcal offers a more personalized approach with features like branded booking pages, personalized meeting invitations, and a sleek, modern interface.
• Sidekick AI helps users schedule meetings effortlessly by scanning emails for meeting requests and automatically proposing times based on availability. It also provides scheduling links for one-on-one or group meetings.
• Clara is an AI-driven virtual assistant that schedules meetings via email conversations. It mimics human-like communication, coordinating with participants to find the best meeting times.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

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The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner Must Master (and How to Manage Them All)

The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner Must Master (and How to Manage Them All) written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I discussed the many hats small business owners wear and how to manage them effectively. Running a business often feels like spinning plates—balancing leadership, sales, client management, and more. Without the right systems in place, entrepreneurs can quickly become overwhelmed.

I broke down the seven essential roles every small business owner must master and shared practical strategies for streamlining operations, leveraging automation tools, and using business delegation to scale efficiently. From marketing strategy to project management, these insights help entrepreneurs focus on business growth while reducing day-to-day chaos.

Mastering these small business management roles is key to scaling a business without burnout. By delegating, automating, and focusing on core priorities, entrepreneurs can build a more sustainable and profitable business.

Key Takeaways:

• CEO Vision: Small business owners must take time to plan long-term goals and growth strategies to avoid getting stuck in daily tasks.
• Sales & Marketing: Consistently generating leads and automating follow-ups ensures a steady pipeline of clients.
• Strategic Planning: A repeatable marketing strategy helps differentiate your business and deliver measurable results.
• Project & Client Management: Using productivity tools for entrepreneurs like Monday or Asana simplifies workflow and client communication.
• Finance & Accounting: Outsourcing bookkeeping frees up time and ensures financial stability.
• Time Management & Delegation: Leveraging virtual assistants for business and outsourcing for small businesses reduces workload while improving efficiency.
• Automation & AI: Sales automation and business process automation help small business owners scale without increasing workload.

Chapters:

[00:26] Juggling Multiple Roles
[04:38] The CEO Role
[05:37] The Sales Person Role
[07:09] The Strategist Role
[08:46] The Project Manager Role
[09:49] The Marketing Role
[12:59] The Client Manager Role
[13:56] The 4-Prong Approach

 

Duct Tape Transcript

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John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today, just me, solo show. Those of you out in TV land, see I've got my DTM hat wearing just for this solo show. So what are we gonna talk about today? Remember when I was a little kid, I went to the circus, probably many of you did as well. I think they still have it around. Anyway.

They had the elephants and the trapeze and all that stuff, right? But my favorite, always remember was like this guy that would have like seven or eight plates and you'd have them spinning on these long big sticks. You've probably seen somebody do that before as well. And you know, it's just as one would start to drop, he'd get over there and get that one going again. And then he'd find another one that was getting ready to drop and he'd do that one again. you know, years later, I find that and maybe some of you can relate running a business is a lot like that, isn't it?

feel like we're constantly spinning plates. And there's a reason for that. Unless you have 50 or 100 people working for you, you've probably got multiple roles. In fact, the typical small agency owner, marketing consultant, that's who we work with. That's who I want to talk with, talk about today. I would say that we've all got like seven roles that we have to do every single day, maybe or maybe a lot of them we're not doing, but they still follow us, right? And so

I want to talk today about what those roles are, but then I want to spend some time focused on how we actually free ourselves from the chaos of that, of the, many of those roles. mean, there's so many amazing tools today that we have available to us. mean, AI being one of them, of course, but a lot of automation tools that really can make life a lot easier.

There's a couple other things, certainly delegation to VAs and things. So I'm going to cover all of those today. So let's go with the seven roles, what they are first off. The first one is CEO. mean, whatever you call yourself, somebody's got to have, somebody's the leader, that's probably you, has to have a vision for the business. so, and that's a role that I see that doesn't get played very often. But if we're not looking up and occasionally saying what needs to happen or where do I want to be this time next year?

John Jantsch (02:12.75)

be really, really simple. I mean, you don't obviously have the same needs as a large organization for a CEO, but somebody who's at least somebody that being you, who's at least thinking about like, where am I trying to take this thing? What's the big picture? All right. Number two, salesperson. Nobody's going to make it rain, but you, right? I mean, you're out there generating leads. You're out there having those meetings. You're out there closing those deals. That's a, that's obviously a very important role that you have to play typically.

Strategist, if you are a marketing consulting firm, if you're an agency, you need to develop strategy for your clients. That's really what's going to differentiate you from everybody else who's making those marketing plans, who's helping that client decide where they're trying to go. Project manager, right? Once you get the client, you do the strategy, you turn into a project manager, managing maybe its vendors or managing projects, campaigns, whatever the work calls for, there is essentially a project manager.

role in it. Then client manager, we have to do the reporting, we have to actually if we're gonna, if we're gonna have long term retainer clients, which are my favorites, we're gonna have to actually maintain that relationship, we're gonna have to be showing value, week in, week out, month in, month out. And that's a role. That's a that's a function inside of business. And then finally, do we call it accountant? I don't know. It's a finance role. Somebody has to collect the money, somebody has to send out the invoices, somebody has to balance the

The checkbook, somebody has to make sure that bills are being paid on time, right? So there is that bookkeeping function. most people that I work with, agency owners, didn't go into business because they love doing that work, but it's an essential role. So of these roles, I think the key is to decide.

which ones are the most important? You know, you can make a case for all of them, right? But there's no question that selling work, doing strategy, maintaining clients, maybe marketing your own business. I mean, these are roles that really have to be done on a consistent basis if you're going to grow the business until you start getting help, until you can start getting into the role where maybe you are doing one or two of these and you have people doing some of the other roles.

John Jantsch (04:31.576)

So how do you balance that idea that some roles are more important than others, but you can't just simply neglect or abdicate any of roles. So let's go through those and talk about maybe how you not escape the role, but escape the chaos of either doing the role poorly or not at all. All right, so the first one, CEO. This is something that in a small business, I mean,

Time blocking is is the probably the only way you're going to get to this right? If you just put it down as a task, think big about my business and then that like everything else on your checklist has to be addressed first. You've got to give yourself. I don't care what it is, but let's just pretend it is. Monday afternoon, block off two hours and use that two hours to think about the future of your business. The vision of business where you're trying to go.

who you need to be doing that with, what you need to be doing without kind of feeling like, in between that, I'm gonna return email and I'm gonna do this project proposal for a prospect. No, that time is your big thinking time. If you don't do it, if you don't take that time to analyze where you are, where you're going, where you wanna be, where the opportunities are, it never gets done. And then you just get really trapped in, gosh, wonder what I did today. Don't know, I sure was busy, right?

So having that time is how you play the CEO role. Now the salesperson role, you've got to really get good at automating a lot of your follow-up. mean, if you are putting, if you're generating leads by inviting them to webinars or you're writing, having eBooks or things that they can download, checklists that they can download, you want to make, you know, the active campaigns of the world, the HubSpots of the world will allow you to create a 15 series email follow-up series

that just heaps value after value after value conversation and does it really automatically. I mean, that one's kind of a no brainer because you really want to be taking a look, know, sale, active campaign, HubSpot, both also have pipeline. So you want to be taking a look at, are people I've talked to, here are people I want to talk to, here are people that have expressed interest but not move forward. You want to be having that kind of conversation where you can use those tools to automate

John Jantsch (06:54.862)

You know, if you move somebody from, we had this conversation or we had this meeting, now I'm going to move them to another stage in the pipeline. And that'll automatically continue to nurture them with a different series of emails because they've moved to a different spot in the journey. So it takes time to set some of those things up, but really from a salesperson standpoint, you have to do it. Sales and marketing are something that you have to do every single day. And if you don't set those things up,

you'll not only be dropping opportunities, but you'll be very inconsistent in terms of pipeline. And I think that's one of the real killers with a smaller business because you get busy and then you look up one day and go, we haven't been doing any marketing. Now the strategist role, mean, here's the pitch from duct tape marketing. If you're an agency or to this role, developing marketing strategy, developing the master plan for a client.

is something that you need to have a repeatable proven system for. If you are constantly making it up with every new client, reacting to what they say they want, here's a hint. They don't know what they want. Well, they know what they want. They don't know what they need. They come to you with a list of tactics. We need you to do our social media and run that campaigns and produce content. What they need is a marketing plan, a marketing strategy that really differentiates them.

And that's something that we license to agencies, fractional CMOs, consultants as the strategy first leadership system. They need leadership and they need scope. They need you to tell them what to do. They need you to lead them. So having a proven system to do that, quite frankly, is absolutely how you escape really that role from drowning you. Cause that's, you know, I've talked to many, many business owners, many, many agency owners, and that's the role that

consumes in some cases the greatest amount of time because it's custom work every single time you do it. So what I imagine if you actually had a client come to you and say, hey, we need a website. You say, yes, you do. But first you need strategy first. And here's how. And then you literally went down the process step by step. Here's the process. You taught others in your organization to run many aspects of the process. You don't have to think about what are we going to do? We're going to do strategy first.

John Jantsch (09:16.588)

I mean, it's a game changer. All right, let's keep moving. Project manager. So you got to work, you develop strategy. They say, the strategy's brilliant. Who's gonna do this? And you say, well, I guess we are. And so there, again, using tools like, and we happen to use Monday, project management tools that allow you to not only show your client everything's on track, give them unified communication.

give them access to all the reports, setting up a project management process that uses a technology like Monday or ClickUp or Asana. mean, there are a dozen, they probably all work about the same way. It's essential, I think, if you are going to make this work. And a great deal of the things I've talked about, AI can play a real role in helping you. It can help you create, it can help you analyze your sales calls, past sales calls. It could help you create that email nurture

Setup that I talked about it could actually help you Set up repetitive tasks in some of the the you know, most of these tools today are building AI into it You can set up repetitive tasks in those All right marketing Your own agency. This is probably the one that gets most people I mean We were a lot of successful agencies in there and I can't tell how many times they've said so they're coming to us, you know analyzing our program and saying

and don't look at my website because it's a work in progress or it needs to be updated or I don't know what it is. Maybe some of you have experienced that, right? We all do. It's so hard to work on our own stuff because we're working on our clients' stuff. We've successfully done where we've actually, we have project managers in our business and we actually assign a project manager to our business as a client.

And I suggest that that's how you have to look at it is you are one of your clients, you've got to get that work done. And that's where really, you know, delegation, having somebody on board to do it. Consistently producing content, reproducing content, a lot of the AI tools, I never advise anybody to go to chat GPT, and say, give me a blog post on x words, but it does a great job of outlining

John Jantsch (11:34.466)

hub pages or outlines for bigger topics or giving you ideas. Then you write the content in your point of view, your voice. And then it does a really good job at repurposing that content into video scripts, into webinars, into LinkedIn posts. And then of course, you know, all of the social networks now tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, Zapier, depending upon how you say it.

Lately, all of these tools really allow you to take a long piece of content, turn it into a hundred social posts, schedule those social posts out. The tools now will analyze. Lately is a great tool. It'll actually analyze your content for what will get the most engagement. So there are many things that you can do and it's not just a matter of spraying stuff around, but today, our clients, our prospects are actually

participating in a lot of networks. They're getting their information a lot of different places. And so to some degree, we have to have that content in the format that they want it. Video, audio, text, short form, long form, both in video, long form, short form. So I mean, it's overwhelming job to do that. And so using some of these assistants to really help you can be key. And before I go any farther, let's use that word assistant again.

There are so many great ways for you to get virtual assistance. And it may not be, you're gonna go out and find the marketer of the century and you're going to delegate all your marketing to them. But maybe your first step is to actually say, look, of these seven roles that John's talking about, which ones, what are those that I can't do, I don't like to do, maybe aren't as essential for my business?

You know, finance is essential, but it's not essential that you do it. That's one that there are a ton of people out there that just basic bookkeeping can be purchased very inexpensively and it'll get done right. It'll get done on time. You will have your invoices going out. So, you know, there are places where, you know, investing in your business to get to free up not just time, not just tasks, but maybe even headspace. You know, some of these roles you don't get to because you just don't have the headspace.

John Jantsch (14:00.814)

I think we covered, no, I'm down to client manager, keeping clients happy. Boy, I tell you, this is one where we have heavily used AI. And the reason is because a lot of the reports that we get, you use tools like SEMrush and you use Google Analytics and you get these reports, you get a lot of data, but making sense out of the data, extracting anything that demonstrate to a client, here's the value of what we're doing.

AI is tremendous at actually analyzing those results. you know, using tools for that. In terms of accounting, again, I'm sure I don't think there's an AI tool out there that'll send invoices. The day's coming. We will have that. But in terms of the accounting role, I would definitely say that's one that find somebody to do that. If you're doing that yourself, it's not getting done well. It's not getting done on time. And that's going to seriously hurt your business.

Here's kind of the four prong approach, if you will.

John Jantsch (15:08.216)

Figure out what's important, figure out what you like to do and what you're good at doing. What's the most valuable to your business and focus on creating systems and processes around those things that free up some of your time. Think about what you could delegate. And again, the list for that is what do I hate doing? What am I not good at doing? What maybe doesn't move the needle?

if I'm doing it. And those are the first things that you should delegate and outsource so that you're not doing them. The trouble with a lot of agencies is that, even solopreneurs, maybe you have three or four clients. And so, hey, I can do all this work. But then you look up one day and you can't. You're designing the websites, you're writing all the copy, you're doing all the things, and all of a sudden, you've got as much as you've

got on your plate, can no longer look for clients. You can no longer do really great work. You're getting burned out. So, you know, delegating and outsourcing as soon as possible is a real key here. So the seven roles that I defined are important. They're the plates that you have to keep spinning. But guess what? You can build foundations under those plates. They don't have to be a little skinny stick anymore. So

That's my two cents. If you'd like to know more about the duct tape marketing strategy first leadership system that we licensed to agencies and consultancies, check out duct tape marketing.com. We'd love to visit with you about how we might be able to bring our proven systems processes, almost business in a box. These seven roles are all covered in our training. So we can bring you that proven system so that you

can actually start getting out there and doing your best work, having a life, scaling a business that serves that life. All right, thanks for tuning in. Love to hear your feedback on today's show and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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