High Intent
High Intent explores unfiltered lessons from the frontlines of modern marketing.
Hosted by Justin Rubner, High Intent features interviews with innovators in brand building, demand generation, sales conversion and beyond.
- Why are CMOs disappearing?
- What behavioral science principles can marketers employ to ensure better conversions?
- How should a new marketing leader scale an early-stage company?
- How can we get sales reps to follow through on cold MQLs?
... These are just some of the topics we explore.
About your host: Justin has spent his marketing career building and scaling marketing programs — for tech startups and Fortune 500 companies ranging from NCR to CoStar Group. He also was a brand strategist for the Air National Guard.
A former business reporter, Justin brings positioning and storytelling front and center to his approach to ensure clarity, pipeline growth and long-term brand equity.
High Intent
Strategy > Branding > Marketing: Are you running Down The Hallway Blindfolded?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Want to know one of the most empty words in business today?
Strategy.
In so many executive meetings, it’s often operational tactics that take center stage. And to be honest, when it comes to market strategy sessions, if you look around the room, many people are doing “real” work … like responding to emails … when they should be using their high-priced brains to solve more abstract problems.
Positioning, in my view, is one of the most important things we as leaders can spend our time on. But, damn, is it hard. And often, even when we do get it right, we don’t spend the time to strategize on operationalizing it.
Welcome to High Intent, where we explore unfiltered lessons from the frontlines of modern marketing. I’m your host Justin Rubner. My next guest, Joel Alpert, has three decades of experience helping companies act with more strategy as a consultant and fractional CMO.
You could call him the Chief Lightbulb of MarketPower — a consultancy that focuses on business strategy, branding, positioning, and rebranding.
His passion is making sure that companies have a clear compass to guide their direction. I’ve served on several marketing webinars with him, and he always has bright ideas and tips for becoming more strategic.
Want to know one of the most empty words in business today? Strategy. In so many executive meetings, it's often operational tactics that take center stage. And to be honest, when it comes to market strategy sessions, if you look around the room, many people are doing real work, you know, like answering emails, when they should be using their high-priced brains to solve more abstract problems. Positioning, in my view, is one of the most important things we as leaders can spend our time on. But Dan, is it hard? And often, even when we do get it right, we don't spend enough time to strategize on operationalizing it. Welcome to High Intent, where we explore unfiltered lessons from the front lines of modern marketing. I'm your host, Justin Rubner. My next guest, Joel Alpert, has three decades of experience helping companies act with more strategy as a consultant and fractional CMO. You could call him the chief light bulb of market power, a consultancy that focuses on business strategy, branding, positioning, and rebranding. His passion is making sure that companies have a clear compass to guide their direction. I've served on several marketing webinars with him, and he always has brought ideas and tips on becoming more strategic. Let's do this. So, Joel, welcome to High Intent. You know, you've been consulting with companies as a fractional CMO and a marketer with market power for 26 years now. The first question I'd like to ask you is based on that experience and observation, what does positioning actually mean to you?
SPEAKER_01So positioning is when a company presents itself in the marketplace and they say, This is who we are, this is what we do. Doesn't tell you all about what how they're going to get there. It doesn't tell you all about their strategy. It tells you as a company are telling your audience what you want to say. This is how you should think about us. When you do that and you have a piece of their mind, a piece of their consciousness, you get a really strong opportunity to make an impact for sales, for engagement, for anything else that goes down the line. You don't have that positioning. If you've got a burst pipe, and I'm the best electrician in the world, I can't help you now. You know, I you need a plumber, baby. So the main thing is that you not only are a plumber, but you're not you're a plumber who knows how to do their problem, right? I had a buddy uh just last week. The pipes burst on his street. They dug up his whole yard, they dug up his driveway, they finally found something that was wrong because they were the wrong kind of plumbers. When they send the right plumbers, it works.
SPEAKER_00What do you think companies are getting wrong in their positioning efforts?
SPEAKER_01The biggest concern that I have ever had from the time that I have did only direct marketing and only branding and little strategy, now I'm more focused on the strategy side. The biggest concern I've always had is you're not thinking it through going in. So when people start to take action, and it seems well-intentioned, I need leads, I need sales, don't tell me about all this other stuff. Don't tell me about this strategic babble. We've done it before, we hate it. We sit in meetings, we waste our time, and it's really true. These people are not crazy. But when you're chasing your tail, wasting your time, literally, some of these strategic meetings, I I've sat through some where other people have been running them, and I'm supposed to be a participant. And I I just noticed that everybody in the room is squirming and trying to sneak in, you know, responses to their emails, and nobody really cares what's going on. And when that's the environment, that's a real problem because strategic thinking, strategic thinking sessions should really be engaging, should really be bringing out the best in people, should be energizing people. You and I and everybody else we work with are spending the majority of our time in our days working on stuff. You're gonna tell me that I don't care about what I'm doing, and I'm just gonna mindlessly do it. So when you really focus, it's an upstream game. It really is. And most people don't even want to do it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they just want it, they just want to do now. They do, and that's my experience as well. And positioning strategy uh gets me excited, and it's hard. It's harder. You're right. The uh so many people want to focus on the here and now, the immediate leads, the operational problems. But talking about positioning is, I think, seen as kind of an ethereal thing to it.
SPEAKER_01It really shouldn't be. It shouldn't be, but it's seen that way, and you're right. I'm surprised because you said uh working on the positioning is hard, and it really is. And one of the reasons why I think it is hard is because people make assumptions going in and they don't have stuff to find, they just want to get it done right. Hold on. This is a model, it's called structural tension model. I picked this up for my consultant, a mentor who I study with for 13 years. Here's where I want to go, you know, down here is where I'm at right now. I want to resolve this tension as fast as possible. There's a there's a difference between where if my shirt doesn't disappear, uh or is it disappearing man? It's pretty cool, you know. Uh it's it's a lot of fun in a gym locker. But if I want to go from where I am to where I want to go, I've got to take steps to get there. And if I don't do that, then all I'm doing is resolving this tension between I'm not where I want to go, and here's where I am right now. I'm just not, you know, I just want to resolve this tension. I wanna wanna be done with this. Let's get going. And it's the biggest mistake that companies make, large, small, medium, it doesn't matter, biggest mistake. They resolve this tension prematurely. You want to cultivate this, you want to be very clear about where you're going, very clear about where you are. And over time, you take the action steps you need to take it. Nowadays, I I just uh came off a webinar a couple hours ago about lifetime value of customers, and it was you know pretty decent. And it was uh explaining that people don't develop these relationships anymore. And it's true that the marketplace has changed, and also they don't develop of relationships, uh long-term relationships, like for lifetime value. I mean, I cut my teeth working for the best advertising agencies in the country doing direct marketing. That's where I started. And we have this concept called LTV, lifetime value. Uh-huh. And it's a really good idea, and it's it's reality. You know, in other words, you could, if you get a great client and you do business with them for years, they could do great for you. So, you know, they buy your stuff, they refer you, they're loyal, they're fantastic. But that loyalty, that engagement is not sticking as much as it used to. People, you know, flit around, they they search the web, they use AI, and they they find all kinds of other sources in seconds, and they jump around, they don't know what to do. That short attention span needs to be dealt with. But the best way you could deal with it is at least understand that that's what's going on in the marketplace and strategically engineer your actions so that they can take the short-term action steps that they want to take right now. The best you can do. It'll be better if you really built over time. But you know, the best thing you can do in this fast-changing, evolving discrepancy, busting world, this, this, this discrepancy between, I gotta be here, but I'm really here. Okay, let's make believe that with air. Yeah, that's that that'll do it. Making believe is not gonna help you, and lying about where you're at is not gonna help you. You really just got to do the work and get there.
SPEAKER_00And I'm glad you share that observation about people and positioning strategy meetings. It's it's my observation as well. As you said, number one, it's hard. Simplifying things is hard. And so many of us in business want to make everything complicated. We want to sell everything, and and you can't, if you have 10 seconds to grab somebody's attention, you can't market and sell everything. No, so number one, it's hard. Number two is especially with people who had been at companies for a long time, is that there are a lot of embedded assumptions. Yeah, and some of those uh bet embedded assumptions were wrong from the get-go, potentially, or have grown wrong due to evolution of the market and customers and technology. But thirdly, I'd like to put that blame on us, the marketers, is that whether we're outsourcing this or insourcing it, we release this brilliant positioning strategy and we don't put the effort into uh figuring a way to adopt it at every customer touch point and cross-functionally to other people who should be using it. So that's my observation, at least.
SPEAKER_01Uh in other words, you're saying, uh, Justin, that we don't just take the stand for what we need to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. We don't do enough with it. It should be a living document and it should be a blueprint for all of our customer interactions and prospect interactions. However, I find that a lot of the time we don't spend the effort of deploying it tactically. You know, I agree.
SPEAKER_01And you talked about internal and external, and whether it is internally or externally driven, a lot of times people who have these assumptions for a long time, they're used to doing things the same way, are arsonists who later play the role of firefighter. They start the damn fire and they know how to put it out because they're working with all these assumptions and they're working in their narrow mindset. And that's really a shame because the marketplace really evolves. Your products and services, like you said, you haven't looked at it for a long time. Your products and services evolve. Your positioning could evolve with the market. It should, right? People aren't doing it. Or they're just taking a half-assed way to do it. You can't position by having just a new hero image on your website. You really got to think about what you're doing. And of course, you want to have a great hero image on your website, yes. But that's not the end all. The end all is really thinking through what does the marketplace really need? What do we offer? How do we make it obvious that when I come to you with my stuff, you say I want it? Great. That's what marketing is supposed to do, and it's supposed to be closed by sales. When we do that, we win. When we don't do that, we haven't really thought of just it's so basic. I mean, like, are you kidding me? And we're not doing it. You know, or so many companies aren't doing it. And if they're doing it a little, they're not doing it as well as they could.
SPEAKER_00Yes, agreed. How would you recommend that uh a marketing team actually deploy the brilliant positioning that we all came up with in real life? Like, how do we actually transfer that to messaging, right? Messaging is different than positioning. How do we put that in the messaging? How do we put that in front of every customer touch point? And how do we get other people in the company to adopt this uh in their DNA?
SPEAKER_01So that's really important, and that's part of where the rubber meets the road, right? So strategy without tactics is a waste, and tactics without strategy is a waste. Yes. Yeah. So make them work, crying out loud. So I just touched on three things really quick that that you know, the way strategy transfers, and I'll give you an example. Strategy could be really good brand strategy and a good presentation that you haven't done before, and it's better than your competitors, and you're doing great. So there it could be, it could be in a really strong brand. It could be in the way you reach out tactically, even though I'm you know I'm talking strategic. It's like I work with a small landscaping company that has killed in the marketplace by focusing on the right products and services. That's strategic. But tactically, I get after this guy all the time and I say, I haven't seen your posts in a day. I want them every day. Social posts? Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01We're out here working in your neighborhood. Now that that's great. I mean, people can relate to that. But the most impact that I think strategic thinking happens when it gets transferred to tactical actions. I think it happens when you are adjusting combination of your products and services and your presentation of them. So, what is a product and service? Why would even product and service be uh related to your strategy or your branding? I mean, it's a product and service. You've got your company branding, you got your company strategy. Why would this be related? And the answer is when you're thinking strategically, you're adjusting your products and services to really meet the needs of the marketplace. It's not just ephemeral bullshit. It's really down-to-earth, really important, straightforward stuff. I said I give an example. So here's a good example, I think. I worked with a company that maintains restaurant equipment, and they it's a very incestuous business because the guy who has a grill that breaks down could call his local guy. Guy who has his grill breakdown could call a supplier and get a new product and service. So, what what this company does is it does everything that's related to the maintenance of all the products and services, and they manage the process. So let's say I'm a restaurant manager and my grill breaks down or my ice making machine breaks down. Do I fix it? Do I get a new one? What do I buy? How do I fix it? Where do I get the best deal? Is it the right product? People don't know that. Well, this company has really made their expertise that area. And now they have a range of offerings that includes how to buy the right products and services for you. Yes, it's a 15% markup. Very transparent. We'll show you the bill, but we're going to give you the good service. Yes, we're going to get somebody to you as fast as possible because we've got a wider range of people to draw from than you know. Yes, we will support our service partners who may be the same people you might hire, and we'll support them with technical diagrams and uh information live while they're doing a repair job so that they could be more efficient. So it's that kind of level of service, that's a product-oriented service that comes from a strategy of how the company is going to deal with their marketplace. And bridging the gap there is the branding that explains to people why it's better. So when you look at things holistically, find all kinds of places where your uh strategy transfers into tactics, into branding, into products and services, into customer service, into every area of the business, really. Most people won't do most of it most of the time. They'll do some of it some of the time, and that's better than none of it. And that's good.
SPEAKER_00So you're saying that marketing strategy should help guide some product and service strategy.
SPEAKER_01Yes. If Justin, you define the marketing strategy more widely, you know, you could define it more widely or more narrowly. I don't have any problem with either one as long as we're on the same page. But I think of it as strategy, branding, marketing. So I got my strategic stuff, my strategy, my thinking, my company direction, my marketplace, what I offer, the products and services, the branding, how I present it, and the marketing, how I get it out there. Really, it's all marketing. You know, it's all part of marketing. It's how you get it out there. I break it out further, but that's okay. And marketing really should be broader. And most people honestly don't just don't, they don't have the opportunity to really present it. You know, a minute ago, I made some remark about we've got to be gutsy to, you know, present this and shouldn't we be stronger in doing that? What if you're gonna lose your job about that? What if you've got to lay low? That's too bad. It really is, because if a marketer has the opportunity, do better. And the company just won't get it because that's the way they've always done it, or I don't see the value of that more than what we're doing now, or you know, whatever excuse they have, it's really too bad. You know, it's just it's just a missed opportunity. In this marketplace, it's very it's obviously very competitive. You know, that's that's the understatement of the day. So, you know, we have the attention span of gnats. You know, goldfish have more attention span than than than we have. And uh they'll look at you for a second and then they'll go, okay, nothing going on here. We don't even have that. So if we're gonna gain the attention of our audience, we really have to position well, we really have to be strategic and that could that could change if goldfish had social media. Agreed.
SPEAKER_00Hey, along the same vein, what you were talking about, you're talking about marketing being all the way at the at the product strategy level, and I love that. Uh, I'm gonna bring it down a big notch here, and I've seen this happen, is that marketers get caught in a tactical wasteland of chasing immediate leads. And if you were to see this happening, how would you recommend that they get out of this game of chasing the tail or as you said it before, whack-a-mole? Right.
SPEAKER_01So it's really hard to get out of that pattern. I have a client who is in a very specialized type of loan business. And we were supposed to talk, we did talk in in in uh mid-January, and uh I said, okay, we're ready to move this big rebrand uh ahead. And he says, I gotta put it off again, Joel. Sorry. And I go, Why? And he says, I got 4,000 loans ready to close, and I've got to pay attention to a bunch of them. 4,000 loans? This is a relatively, you know, I thought a smaller business. It's apparently bigger scope than I thought. And it's national, you know, and it's it's a you know, it's a really unusual company. And it's very hard to walk away from leads when you know they're gonna go right into sales. So it's very hard to do that. It's like a drug addict pulling away from heroin, right? It just don't happen so easy. So you're always chasing it. But I got through to this guy and I said, listen, dude, remember when you were in the hospital in October and you were out for three and a half weeks, and the business survived without you. You might have made some more money, but you gave it a lot of thinking, and you came out of that meeting with some steps that we implemented because you were thinking, you were pulling back. Thinking and not acting. Yeah. Right. And he says, Joel, I hate you. You give me too many good examples, you know. And I go, Great, hate me, please do. You know, so it's sort of like it's very hard. It really is hard what you're saying to not chase the leads. But as a marketer, may maybe I'm not I'm I'm taking a stab at this, but maybe the way to do it is to show there's a correlation between the conversion rate that you have and the good branding that you have. Because if you got leads and you're just chasing them, you're using company resources. Question is when you use your company resources, when you use your time and your effort, are you closing? Are you making them as profitable as they could be? Could you have cross-sold more to a particular uh prospect or client? All those things are really hard to measure independently, and very few people are doing that. Very few people are really being analytical to that, to that level. People say, we're tracking, we're tracking everything, we're looking for ROI. Honestly, I look for trends that I think are really real, and I try to disregard the ones that I think are pseudo-real. You know, it looks like it's go this way. Show it to me and really make sense out of it, then I then I'm happy and then I'm willing to act. But just acting on half information without having clarified information, without understanding implications of what's going on, without seeing discrepancies in what they're saying, and just taking the information and eating it like cereal, that don't work. You know, let's let's take a look. You know, so when you do, you really could break it out and you can turn those tactics, those sales, those leads into something much more.
SPEAKER_00Also you want to hear something that used to boil my blood?
SPEAKER_01What's that?
SPEAKER_00And I've I've gotten more mature about it, but that is uh a cross-functional leader coming up to your marketing team and they hand them their brilliant strategy of entering a market or their copy for uh an outbound campaign or something, and they're like, here, just make it look pretty.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's all you have to do, that's all you as a marketer know how to do.
SPEAKER_00And I'm telling you, Joel, as a younger leader, that would boil my blood and my face would turn red. But I've learned that it's really my fault. If people are coming to you and they think that that's what your smart team is only capable of, I feel like that's that's our fault, right? And we are professional communicators, and we need to be better at Telling our stories about how our strategy aligns with growth much, much better and stop using marketing speak and seeing us more as uh uh window dressing, so to speak. So I make it a point to uh and I don't always do it well, but making sure that you're advocating uh and telling the story, not just telling, but showing, right? I feel like we need to we're kind of bad at this, in my opinion. Do you do you agree with that? Yes and no.
SPEAKER_01Uh I have been bad at it. I I may a culpa, but I'm usually not. This depends on what the stakes are. Honestly, I mean, we're in business, and there's sometimes you take risks that are too high for now. And sometimes the better long-term strategy is to chip away at it and to show people what some action results in, and maybe over time they'll they'll go for the bigger moves. So that's a very long-term uh orientation. More often than not, I'll fight like a dog, just try to make a point. I mean, I mean, I had a client, it's a small business client, they wanted to do a down and dirty rebrand. And uh we did a down and dirty rebrand, and and she said, I want my team to work on the logo. And I go, okay. And so would you like me to provide some creative direction for it? Because you know, I've done that for a couple hundred logos, you know, and you make a nice logo. So she says, Yes, I really want that, and I did. And she kept on sending me what the team was doing, and it went from bad to worse. Sure. Even that visual element of it was really weak. And and she's got a great business, you know, and and it lends itself to a good logo. It's it's a dynamic name. I don't want to say say it now because I don't like the logo, but um, she wound up launching a site without a logo, it's just some type, and there's no like brand identity, there's very little brand copy. She said, I just gotta get it going. You know, let's get back to this. Well, before the summer, I'll have time. Yeah, okay, great. So she gets you're gonna go and you're going to impact your best prospect with a brand new website, and you're gonna show them who you are, and they're gonna go, hmm, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You're losing all that potential equity, you're not gonna get a lot of it back. Right.
SPEAKER_01It's very, you know, it it's very hard to get anything back at that point. You know, we say that um, you know, branding is your first impression, and you know, and you never make uh you never have the opportunity to make another first impression. Great. So do it right. You know, and people again don't have the patience, they want to unstretch that rubber band so fast, they don't want to have that difference between these two points. Just give it to me now. Yeah, just you know, revenue demands are so high nowadays. Yeah, and I understand that. And it seems like it's the right thing to think about, but give me 20% of your time in those instances, five percent, I'll tell you. Yeah, you know, and let let's get this ship steered in the right direction.
SPEAKER_00Joel, you've said that strategy and strategic planning are not abstract. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01Because people have bad meetings in the past, they've disrespected, they don't understand that it does translate to those next steps, whether it's the logo, whether it's the brand positioning, whether it's your hero image and your and your hero image uh headline, or whether it's the products and services, it's really the way you present and the way you plan. So, for example, if you don't think strategically and you're going on vacation and you say, Hey, listen, I'm off. Uh we start on Sunday. Here we go, we're going on vacation. Great. And then Saturday night and Sunday morning as you're getting ready to go, they go, What should we pack? And you go, Well, yeah, beach gear, right? Go, beach gear. I thought we're going skiing. You know, so you don't even know where you're going. Of course, it's like a silly dramatic example, but it's really, it applies, right? So if you don't have that strategic orientation, you're not really thinking about what is it that I do now? What does it affect the next step and the next step after that? How does it affect it? And we're not thinking about that. We're we're only thinking about, I want to try to make this step effective. And then we're not thinking about what's the next step. Where does that lead to? If you think strategically, you're always at that point. I'm always thinking about where's this go, and I'm living into that next step if I can. If I'm doing better and I'm a little smarter that day and I've had enough coffee, maybe I'm thinking two steps ahead. I've had clients, I've I've done response-oriented campaigns that are that are targeted marketing campaigns where we are asking for phone calls, we're asking for email responses, we're asking to click a link, we're asking to reply, uh, send back a card, anything that has a response. And we weren't ready for them.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01At one point, I visited a client.
SPEAKER_00You weren't ready to take the calls and to to respond.
SPEAKER_01To properly deal with it. Absolutely. I had that with a major, I have to keep this unnamed, but one of the biggest transportation companies in the world did this, and we had a tremendous campaign of intermodal transportation. And we sent them these high-impact three-dimensional boxes with hats in it, and it was really phenomenal. And when we went to the client, you know, to have you know, just this general follow-up on a bunch of bunch of the campaigns we've been doing. This is what I was working at an agency here in town, and uh working for them doing direct marketing. And the guy says, Yeah, everything's going good. And uh he says, Oh, yeah, like here's the stack of reply cards. And here's the stack of reply cards. Tell us what's going on with that. I said, Well, you know, we got a bunch of them. Well, we had links and we had email and we had phone and we had reply cards. We had a lot of different ways they could respond. He had a stack of reply cards. His minimal, and they weren't being followed up on. He had them. Yeah, that's nice. And do you know that his minimal contract? This guy is this marketing leader's minimal contract, I think, is $300,000. The smallest contracts. They they ship a lot of stuff all over the world, all over the country, all over the world. And I thought I was gonna cry. I don't cry often, but uh, it was just so sad to just to see that such a big all that beautiful creative work disappear in the ether. I want it to be beautiful, but I also wanted to produce response. That's part of why it reduces response, then it does disappear on the ether, and it did. All that stuff were old leads. These at that point had been 10 weeks old. That's crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Let's talk for a second about uh the infrastructure that you believe uh companies of all types need before they start branding, and that's you know, marketing infrastructure. I've heard you mention this before. I'm guessing you don't think companies should start branding up right off the bat, but that you need some infrastructure to back some of that up.
SPEAKER_01So you certainly do, and like this example that I just gave you with the with the reply cards you had like infrastructure. I mean, it's like you're just not dealing with stuff that's coming in properly. So certainly you have to know to go there. My focus over the last number of years is not to support the heroin addicts with all the things that they need, because we know how to do more with less faster than ever before. You know, years ago, we had something called Martech, marketing com technology, right? And all of a sudden, you know, we could do stuff with these digital tools that were great. And then this, you know, fast forward again, you know, jumping a decade or two, you know, we have this thing that everybody's using. It's a thing called AI. And when people use those terms, we get excited and we cringe at the same time because we don't know if they're if it's taking our jobs or supporting us to do our jobs better. We don't know if it's really giving us some great, efficient ways to work, or is this just giving us a same regurgitated babble that's out there in the marketplace and has it really affect what we're doing? If your company is not a little different, then you're not going to be able to do any of those tactical things better. You're not gonna have your infrastructure lined up to do those things better. So I tend to go back upstream whenever I can and have the support systems match what our direction can be, because otherwise you don't have a match. Of course, you have to have the back end, and you know, you want that. Honestly, that's not my primary area of focus or expertise. So it's sort of like if you're gonna tell me to, you know, to convert some file into some other new kind of table that some other app is using, I'm not the guy for that. But I am the guy to help think through what we should be doing, how should we be doing it? And that's more it's a more of a strategic function. That's what that's about.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Do you feel that positioning is the most important thing that marketers can do on a strategic level? Wow, I've never really thought about that question exactly like that.
SPEAKER_01I think it's a close call between positioning and the product service. So I'll buy your product and service if I want it. I'll even buy it if your positioning is bad because I want it. But I'd have to understand it. So you are denying me the opportunity to understand it well if you're not positioned well. So I look at it as gateways. My my grandmother grew up on the lower east side of New York City, and she lived in something called a railroad flat. And what that meant is you went from room to room to room to room, and that's how every one of these apartments were laid out, right? Yeah. It wasn't like in a big square. So I I think of many of the things that we do in marketing in the same way. We've got strategy first, leads to branding. Arguably positioning is right in there, and it is, and then marketing, and then customer support, customer service, and all the other things that you have there. So it is positioning critical? Yeah. You know, there's no question that it's critical, but I think all of it's critical. And I think that some of it is a gateway to the next step. And if you're a customer and you don't get the positioning, you're you're clicking somewhere else and you're going somewhere else and you're shopping and buying elsewhere.
SPEAKER_00Let's get in the weeds uh to wrap this up uh on positioning. Who should be in the room? We talked about the room where half the people are checking their emails and whatnot. Who should be in this room, in your opinion? And let's take a technology company as an example.
SPEAKER_01I love the question because it's something that I have fought for and believe in, and it's unpopular, but I still fight for what's I think is unpopular. Who should be in the room? Yes, all your marketing executives and your strategic babble people. No. I mean, I mean, yes, for sure, yes, for sure, for sure. But I got news for you. I worked with a magazine format kind of um online and offline publication that dealt with a very high-tech science subject in in in radio activity. And the smartest person in the room was the admin assistant to the executive assistant to the CEO. Sure. She really understood how the company worked.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And every now and then the CEO would say, uh, Adrian, what do you think?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I'm like, can I? And and he'd say, you know, and and she would say, and she smart CEO. She right. Well, smart CEO and smarter admin assistant or executive assistant, whatever she's called. So you really need to have people who are in the room who really understand the business. And you really have to have the receptivity of CEO-level type people and manager and director level people to really respect those folks because you could be in the ether from today till tomorrow. But similar to the question you asked earlier, like, how do you apply tactics? Well, you start with the strategic direction and you apply the tactics to follow the compass point that your strategy pointed you to. And then you're executing. But find out when the rubber meets the road, find out exactly where you're going with this, what problems they're having, if they're storing responses online or in a drawer, do the salespeople understand how to actually sell it according to the branding? Or do they say, yeah, this is the way I do it? You know, I'm I'm very successful at what I do, but I do it my way. You know, could they be more successful if they start if they followed a brand that was established and that's what the prospect already responded to? Could that help them some? I would think so. Yeah. That's why they responded.
SPEAKER_00Do we have secretaries anymore?
SPEAKER_01We have virtual robots, you know. So ask my robot what what it thinks.
SPEAKER_00But certainly uh I agree. I I love that take of not just having the high-powered executives in there, but you know, if your office manager knows the market inside it out, which they may very well, they should be in that meeting. That's a great idea. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So those kinds of people, right? And often they're very disoriented when they go into that meeting. Yeah. Because they go, I've never been in the conference room before. So it's interesting. But warehouse managers. I had a warehouse manager once that was really actually, I think, smarter than the full-time marketing person. You know, so it's sort of like find people who really understand the business. And I don't care what category they're in. That's great. They're gonna help.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. What are the essential elements of a positioning framework for you?
SPEAKER_01So I'll mention them, but I'll have a caveat. You want to be able to be very clear about who's your audience, what do they want, what do you want as a company, where do you want your growth to be? Where do you find the match? Questions like that are critical strategic questions for positioning. But like I said before, a lot of times people come into these meetings and they say, well, this is what we know about the market, and this is what we know about our company, and this is how come how our customers buy. And they're using assumptions that might be 10 years old, they also might be two years old, and that might be too old, right? So, what's going on in the world, in the marketplace with your products and services? So if you're really thinking, you're gonna clarify all information, you're gonna ask questions about discrepancy. You could say, I've got a sales problem, and you're the marketer. So you say, I can help. I'll put out more social media, we'll do email, we'll uh launch the Goodyear blimp. That's great. Except that what are you trying to promote? What are you trying to sell? So I I worked for one company about maybe seven, eight years ago that had this crazy situation. They were very, very siloed. The departments were really separate, a medium-sized technology company. And they did not understand themselves that they wanted to sell the initial offering of the software at a lower price so that they can gain more customers. They didn't understand that because the place where they really made the money was the back-end service. So they're trying to get as much money as they can from the software, and they're cutting off people. They're more expensive than other similar services, and nobody sees the difference about why they should pay more. The branding wasn't strong. The price was too high. Lower your price, get your branding, get those people in, and sell them the service where you make five times the money of the software. Those service contracts were worth more. So, you know, when you think it through, when you think about where it's going, and you think about what your positioning is designed to do and how it should transfer into tactics, then you get your game on and you really start to think, you know, holistically, and that's where engagement is, that's where the money is, that's where the satisfaction of reaching your marketplace with your product or service. Parting wisdom for businesses and marketers who are looking to be more strategic. Don't believe everybody who says they're strategic. That very carefully. I've spoken to so many people, I hear so many conversations, that we did branding, we did strategy, we did none of that was done. A new logo and a new website color strategy is not a strategy. Sure. You really got to think about what are you actually talking about? Are you actually doing the work? Most companies don't even know what's available in that kind of thinking. I know for me, I didn't know either. You know, I was doing uh targeted marketing, I was working for big agencies, I was doing good stuff, but I discovered this guy who I studied with for many years, and he taught me a whole framework for thinking. I don't use it every time, I don't use it all the time, but it's part of my arsenal, and it's an essential part of my thinking where I'm looking, trying to think holistically, I'm trying to think about where this goes. All that background really helps companies focus what they're doing. So it's very hard to get real good strategy. There are people out there who do good stuff, but they're they're relatively few and far between. Sure. And you got to pick them right. I agree. And and the name of that framework? I do what's called structural dynamics consulting, well, structural consulting. And my mentor is a guy named Robert Fritz, and uh he wrote a book called The Path of Least Resistance for Managers, which I think is the best business book that's ever been. I've been recommended that book multiple times in my life. That's fantastic. Yeah. It's it really uh puts it across many of his principles. And I studied with this guy for 13 years, and I I would go up to Vermont three times a year, spend a week at a time, 12, 16 hours a day doing this stuff. And it was it was insane. I would I would come home exhausted and very happy. Book yeah, it was for sure boot camp. They would have CEOs fly in on their private planes in Brattleboro, Vermont, and they touch down. We pick them up, we'd send somebody from our team to go pick them up by car. It's a 15-minute drive. They sit down, give them a cup of coffee, they talk to us for an hour, we give them feedback, and they walk out going, Whoa, that's really interesting. I never thought about that. And you get getting an array of consultants in training doing this stuff. That was great training. So uh that's the kind of work that I did with this guy, Robert Fritz. I think he is got more on the ball in the consulting world than anybody I've ever I've met. So you know that's why I decided to buy into his process.
SPEAKER_00Joel, I will check out that book for sure because this is probably the third time I've heard that. Good. Well, you could be reached at marketpoweronline.com. And Joel, I really appreciate you being on High Intent. It's a pleasure talking with you about it.
SPEAKER_01This is real stuff that we you know we're going through in the real world right now, and it's great to talk with you about it. Great. Take care.