The Pe:p show

Are you taking time to think, just think? Dedicated time for thinking is the key to your own personal growth and development. In this episode, Peep discusses why and how dedicated time to just think actually creates more opportunities for growth and better quality ideas.

Link

Autoscroll: 

Speaker 1: How often do you take time just thinking.
You know if you read the top say management gurus like Warren Buffet and Richard Branson Bill Gates they all talk about thinking or dreaming time in their weekly schedule you know like Buffett sometimes takes a day doing nothing with his notebook looking out the window and just thinking about stuff. Bill Gates also known for taking a two week long trips a year to just think about stuff. What I'm telling you is that if you're just in the right to use this thing in your daily you know getting things done mode you stop thinking about what is the best thing to do to begin with like what should you be focusing on. In some of the top companies there is mandatory thinking time for all top executives. They need to schedule like four hours five hours a week of like uninterrupted time like there are no meetings get booked. Nobody calls them nobody asked them anything they're locked into office and maybe they don't go into the office. They're just there thinking about stuff how to you know what is then what is the next opportunity to go after what is the best way to actually organize this. Know whatever your position might be that there's stuff to it that you have to think about. So what I recommend you do is look at your calendar and put a recurring even just the three hours slot in your weekly calendar where it's just thinking time just sit down and think and what you realize is that you get a better sense of control. You get better insights and you'll utilize your time better.

Keep reading

Branding is everything. But, do you really understand how hard it is to build a company brand as a solo entrepreneur? In this episode, Peep discusses why you should develop personal branding instead of a company brand.

Link

Autoscroll: 

Are you a solo service provider like just a one woman show or one man show? Then be yourself, not a company.
No let's say your name is Jack Johnson or Suzy Collins and you want us No no no actually I'm like Red Bird interactive. It's very very hard for you to do build that company brand. The Red Bird Interactive which is just you Susie it's very hard. It's it's like an uphill battle to just try to create a company that people will respect and follow but it's so much easier to brand yourself as the expert that people want to buy from give money to that they build a connection with start liking you as a person. It's so much easier to build a personal brand. Also your Red Bird interactive like you're embarrassed by being just a small potato just you one person right. That's why you're doing it. You want to appear big in a prominent like more established or whatever whatever it is. That's B.S. You want to own being small. That's your advantage that you're small. Look at the big companies Apple Google Tesla Microsoft they all have also a person that is famous from the company you know like you know whether it's Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever. It's much easier to relate to a human being who is the embodiment of that brand. Like how many employees does Microsoft have right. Well it's oh no it's such a Nadella. The CEO was still like the in bottom the human beat that a human face behind the company we want to connect that person that that's the new Microsoft right. So as a person that is your unique angle just like how many let's say you do paper click. How many people are doing paper click. One hundred thousand or maybe millions like everybody and their mother seem to be doing PPC these days so why choose you Redbird interactive instead of. You know this other other other person. It's very hard for you to distinguish yourself as a company but as a person I'm going to like you. And then I want to buy from you it's so so much easier to just be you. So own it be yourself and put yourself out there.

Keep reading

Do you keep getting product or service requests? Are they related to your core offering? In this episode, Peep discusses how saying no to customer requests that go against your core offering is a key to business growth and successful product development. Warren Buffet says, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

Link

Autoscroll: 

Do you run an agency, offers services and people ask you for things that are not part of your car offering or maybe you're working on a SaaS startup and people keep asking you for new features. So what do you do in those cases.
You say no. The thing is let's say that you do conversion optimization like like we have an agency that does conversion optimization. People ask us things all the time that are not related to what we do. So look there was this one guy who said hey I love you so much. I like what you do. I just want to give you money and buy from you. But I don't have a service yet or I don't think maybe it's a low traffic service. So would you please design a pitch deck for me because I just want to buy from you. Of course it's you know in a way that's tempting. It's like flattering he likes us great and wanted to give us money. Well who doesn't like money but like it's it's a distraction. Like that answer is no no no that's not what we do. We do conversion optimization. This is our core expertise. We're not a design agency because the more you do the thing that you're best at the better you get at it. And all these other things that oh maybe we should also do SEO and PPC and branding and storytelling and the la la la la. It's all a distraction and and like if you if you start doing everything and try to be everything to everybody you're stopping anybody. And the quality of work you do just goes down. Just focus on your core expertise and say no to the requests that don't inline with your core path if you if you run a software company people ask you for features all the time we get requests for CSO Institute features every single day. So what do you do with that. Of course some of it is accurate and valid. If people having usability issues like of course you fix all this stuff but like new features you want to see a who's saying that because there will be people that are asking for features that actually are not your your core audience there they don't represent your typical buyer or the people that Europe you're going after. So like yeah this like like we get we get pushed back. Oh I mean I don't want to. I want to give you money but like I don't want to subscribe to your services. Well I mean if you're subscription averse you're not the right fit to begin with. So anything you say we just couldn't disregard. Well thank you for your feedback but not going to listen to you. Don't listen to customers because they have sometimes silly it is sometimes what they say or who says it just is not a right fit for you. So you want to pay attention to people who are paying you top dollar who represent your target audience and also of course you want to make sure that you don't listen to outliers. If 10 people every day request the feature Yes it's most wanted you want to build that out that's needed it's useful provided of course that it's aligned with but the core thing that you do like in the sixth and they say that if they would say Oh well why don't you also you know enable a file sharing service. Well I mean know that that steers us away from what we're building here. So you need to stay true also to your vision and really know where you're going with your stuff. So all these requests coming in. Just make sure that you know where you're going. What's your what's your core audience core offering and just steer clear from the distractions.

Keep reading

Can you achieve growth by copying your competitors? No, this is not the right growth mindset. In this episode, Peep breaks down why simply copying your competitors will not lead to the growth results you are expecting.

Link

Autoscroll: 

Speaker 1: Your competitors seem to be doing great things. Should you copy them?
Probably not. Because in most cases your competitors are as clueless as you are. They don't know what the fuck you're doing either. So like they roll out some new feature or they roll out some new way to present their stuff and you're like oh well they must have tested that. Like what. Why not. Why why else would they roll this out. Well they probably didn't because what they probably did was they copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody who's blind leading the blind. So do not to not to overestimate your competition and you certainly just don't want to be the copycat. You want to be different from your competitors you want to run your own race. Just listen to customers see what works what doesn't for you because even if if you copy something that they're doing doesn't mean that the same thing will will work for you or even if it does work for them.

Keep reading

Should you sell on Amazon.com? In this episode of The Pe:p Show, Austin Brawner from Brand Growth Experts discusses if your ecommerce business should sell on Amazon or take a chance growing your brand and services away from the ecommerce giant.

Link

Autoscroll: 

Peep: So who should try to be a solo site and not even have anything on Amazon, I just sell through my own store? And when does it make sense to do both? Austin: If you're gonna sell on both one of the things you should think about is how do you connect both of them? What I mean by that is if somebody buys on Amazon, how do you get the information from Amazon to your back end of your store?
Peep: Hi guys I'm here with Austin Brawner from Brand Growth Experts and we're going to talk about Amazon and ecommerce. So Amazon is eating everybody's lunch or it seems that way. Austin: Sure. Peep: So what does an e-commerce company do in this situation like should they be an Amazon not on Amazon hybrid? Austin: Sure. Really tough question right. Amazon is dominating the ecommerce space and businesses that were a couple of years ago doing really well. Are now in this position where they feel like OK what are we gonna do? We're just going to ride out until Amazon takes our product listing. They are rightfully scared. They don't know what to do. So I guess what I've been talking about with with people who are in this position clients in the position is just making sure that you're not competing with Amazon? Really you don't. There's three things the Amazon dominates. Price you're never going to win if you try to compete with price. They're going to beat you every single time. Convenience. They're going to beat you every single time. Right. If you're going to try to compete with them on that you're going to lose. The third thing is selection those three things you if you're competing on any one of those three things you're going to lose. So the idea is compete on things other than price convenience and selection. Peep: So this service and brand or. Austin: Service brand customization that sort of thing doing things that are unique. I was talking to somebody yesterday about their their store. Austin: They sell product at Amazon. They have like a four million dollar sale store on Amazon and they sell mainly one product and they want to get onto Shopify. And the first question asked is why would why would somebody buy from you? From your Shopify store. And that was a really hard question for them to answer right and they started saying well we got guarantees we've got fast shipping. I was like Well everybody can buy from Amazon for that. Peep: And Amazon's guarantee is way better. Austin: Exactly. Much easier to return on Amazon. So I guess things I've been taught things I've been talking to people about has been. Austin: Really trying to compete on outside of those three pillars and making sure that if you're going to have a store that you are really thinking about your strategy before investing in your store. Peep: So who should just try to be a solo site and not even have any but anything on Amazon? I sell through my own store. And when does it make sense to do both? Austin: Sure. I think that's a that's a good question and one that. You know the big answer is It depends on what your business depends on kind of you are. Where you want to take your business? I think companies that should be just specifically on their own store with no Amazon listing are products and businesses that. Are very easy to? To copy and have other people. Peep: Come into. So let's look she the several that's double edged size sword there. So if you're in a commodity business and you're selling a commodity product and you've been dominant in there and you're on Amazon just continue to do that because if you try to break away and have your own store. Austin: You might just lose out on the Amazon opportunity. If you have look at some of the companies that have been successful on on their own store companies like every lane bonobos a lot of the traditional kind of cooler brands you think of it on their own store because they're focused on having an experience that's different. There have unique products I think I'm wearing the shirt here untucked there. They have their own store and they don't sell. I don't believe they sell on Amazon they might. But if they do it's quite limited listings. A lot of what I've seen a lot of people do is have a store and then sell limited listings on amazon and have the true better experience be on their Shopify store or Magento store. Custom builds for. People who sell on both. So. If you're going to sell on both one of the things you should think about is how do you connect? How do you connect both of them? What I mean by that is if somebody buys an Amazon how to get the information from Amazon to your? Back end of your store. How do you get the customer information? I've seen a couple of companies do this recently where they sell a product on Amazon. And then they have a follow up where you have to actually download an app and use an app. To access the product. And with that type of a product they don't care if you sell it they sell on Amazon or they sell on on their store because they're getting all the customer information anyway. That's a good fit where they can sell on both. And they really don't care where somebody comes in makes a purchase. Peep: If you want more interviews like this subscribe to my channel.

Keep reading

ABM works – when it’s done right. Taking shortcuts can cost you time and money. In this video, Steve covers what account based marketing is and how your marketing and sales teams can close bigger B2B deals faster with an effective ABM program.

Link

Autoscroll: 

Peep: So many people that want to B2B deals are actually optimizing for the wrong metric. Bill: Most digital marketers are really just focused on 50000 people hit my web site and gosh my web site conversion rate is 2 percent. I need to get it to 3 percent.
Peep: Hey guys I'm here with my friend Bill Leake. He is a seasoned B2B expert and I was just chatting to him about optimizing for B2B. And you were telling me that so many people that want B2B deals are actually optimizing for the wrong metric. Bill: A lot of times we see teams that are over optimizing for what's taking place on the website or get to the web form or you know get good contact info which is a good start. But that ultimately might still be one month, four months, two years before there's actually a revenue event. Peep: What kind of deal size we're talking about here? Bill: You know it typically... Deal size tends to be correlated with time and length of the sales process. The smaller the deal size the more likely even in B2B you could have a very rapid transaction something within a few days to a few weeks. Typically once the deal size gets up into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people are taking longer to make the decision. And it might involve several different individuals. Peep: Right. So you get a lead in and that was actually the deal is happening off line. There are sales people involved. Bill: Yes. Peep: And so when people are optimizing to get the let's say the lead in. So what's wrong with that? Bill: Well they may be getting the right person. I mean I can easily get leads and we both know that if we want to maximize conversion rate we take out an ad word that says free bags of money and we have a landing page and on it says give me your data and I'll send you a free bag of money or whether you send the money or not. I mean who knows. But you're getting a lot of leads but are those really leads. Peep: So what should you do? Bill: You actually want to do a little bit of qualification on the landing page and in the ad copy if you're selling e-mail marketing software and your niche is targeted to people who have a list of more than 100000 people do you really want the names of people who are looking for MailChimp? Or is that just going to waste the time of your sales reps. So you want to actually decrease your conversion rate a little bit. In the early stages of the journey. So you're not bringing in lots of what are effectively bad leads we'll just waste the time of your sales force? Peep: One of the things that work for our agency was on the lead generation form we added a dropdown for what is your budget for this project and the minimum was like 10k or whatever. And we got instantly got rid of people with no money? Bill: I mean we want to help you do a lot of good good work in the industry. Giving away free stuff for people with no money. The goal is to grow them into people with money so that they can write your check someday. Peep: Right right. So what other common mistakes they are seeing when people do B2B marketing optimization Bill: We see a lot of times were the the people responsible for conversion and for the Web site are not getting the data back from the eCRM system they're not getting it back from the the ActOn the Infusionsoft the Marketo. They may not be pulling data back from Salesforce.com or whatever they're using PipeDrive, ZOHO, on the low end and really you want to figure out of the things that enter the funnel, which are the ones that are making it further down the journey and getting close to a revenue event. And think about conversion optimization really is maybe 12 different conversions that occur down the process some of which occur post web. What kind of tracking would you typically want to set up there you'd want to have every single touch tracked ideally? So from first first contact on the Web site or even even where they were being marketed to with the display ad or something else out there. And then every time they're seeing something digitally. And then also you know did they attend a seminar. You know how many how many e-mails did they get. Which ones did they respond to? How many? So you're able to take that whole data set and it really is it does turn into a big data problem. And that's why in marketing automation they have all this lead scoring and those kinds of things. And most digital marketers are kind of blithely unaware of all that stuff. They're really just focused on you know 50000 people hit my Web site and gosh my Web site conversion rate is 2 percent. I need to get it to 3 percent. Peep: Sure. So we have this data silo problem where we have the CRM here and then we have live chat here and web analytics here and email marketing. So how do you make all of them talk to her. Bill: Now they're there is there is going to be a problem with dirty data? There are bunch of different databases out there. Google Analytics is probably not the single source of truth if you're in B2B unless you're selling stuff on the website. So you have to you have to figure out which is our which is our source of truth and get all those datasets into one database. We're possible with all those codes and then look at it and see what can we learn from them? Peep: Do you use customer data platform, CDPs, for this? Bill: You can you can I mean some of. Those I think are going to be much better a couple of years from now than where they are now they're being they're being oversold with a lot of hype you kind of look at those high curves they are kind of near the top of it right now. So I mean heck we do a lot of Excel, crazy Excel.
You know Google's Data Studio is not bad for some of this stuff. You can you can you can throw some things into a statistical program. I mean the key thing is really thinking through what are the stages of a journey? When you call a funnel and then kind of where does the data live in each of those stages? And sometimes it actually takes a couple years before you actually assemble the data set to have statistical significance. Peep: Right right. And so you want to track if they initiate life at track to make a phone call through the website right. We have integrated call tracking. Are chat leads better than website leads? Are phone leads better than chat leads? And generally the answer is yes to both the more intimate the event. Where a human's getting closer to a human and it's an interactive natural conversation. The more people are likely to take the next step in doing business.

Keep reading

Are you sending the right ad to the right person at the right time?

In this video, Mercer talks about the funnel BEFORE the funnel. He uses his “Behavioral Funnel” technique to build custom audiences for Facebook and LinkedIn along with Google Analytics events to prime customers at the stages before becoming a lead. If you aren’t using Google Tag Manager, now is the time to start!

Link

Keep reading

Stop selling yourself short, optimize your navigation menu the right way!

Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist, has been experimenting with optimizing the main navigation of websites and has found out that most people are doing it wrong. Sites that let the information architecture drive the main nav are selling themselves short. In this episode of The Pe:p Show, I ask Brian why and how menu navigation affects your entire site and what you can do to improve your navbar’s conversion rate.

Link

Keep reading