Don't Bother Eating Your Veggies

In Blair's experience, the most common reason a lead generation plan doesn’t get executed is it doesn’t recognize and leverage the strengths or motivations of the individuals executing.

Links

"The Best Lead Generation Plan" article by Blair Enns for WinWithoutPitching.com

"The Rungs You Can Reach on the Ladder of Lead Generation" 2Bobs episode

Transcript

David. C. Baker: All right, Blair, I have two marketing plans. Each was sent to me by a client that I'm working with currently. One was 93 pages.

Blair Enns: Get out. Seriously?

David: That was the shorter one.

Blair: No.

David: The other one was 122 pages. I have a question for you. No instinctive sort of gut answers. I want you to think about this, okay? How much of the marketing plan do you think they were able to execute? This was a year and a half ago they wrote them.

Blair: Almost none, I would guess.

David: [chuckles] Yes. Except you can just cross the almost out.

Blair: Houston, we have a problem. If your marketing plan is longer than-- what do you think? Where's the cutoff point at which--?

David: Two or three pages.

Blair: Yes. Tell me those numbers again. One was 93 pages?

David: Yes, and the other was 120-some pages. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but I've seen that the lower you push the marketing plan down, like the staff member who's going to write it, the longer it is.

Blair: Oh, yes. [laughs]

David: That's the problem we're solving.

Blair: I'm getting flashbacks to my first agency job when I wrote a few marketing plans for the firm and clients. I remember the first one I wrote for a client. Oh my God, it was a novel. It was a horrible, horrible novel. Everybody dies, not at the end, in the beginning.

[laughter]

David: I don't think I started to think differently about marketing plans until you said one time, maybe six or seven years ago, it's like you really just need to simplify it and kill one or two things. That's the theme of what we're talking about. The best lead gen plan is the one that you will do, and the one that you will do is not long and complicated, right?

Blair: Yes, and it's also highly personal to the way you are wired. That's the part I really want to get into. Your business and my business, they're not very similar, but there are enough commonalities. I could write a marketing plan for my business. I could hand it to you and it might be entirely wrong just based on who you are and based on who I am, not so much based on who or what the businesses are.

David: Yes, I could see you writing a marketing plan for me that had me making 18 phone calls a day and just with glee waiting for me to fail.

Blair: No, my marketing plan for you is one sentence. Keep doing what you're doing. That's your marketing plan.

David: Done. Yes. When I think about what I'm doing, I think an early mistake I made in consulting clients was just assuming that they ought to do the same thing that I'm doing without realizing, wait, I'm a different person. I want to get into, there's two things that you call out at the beginning. You basically define ability and motivation as key factors in this. Let's distinguish between the two of them.

Blair: There's this age old formula in organizational behavior, performance equals motivation times ability. The interesting part of that formula is that ability is a multiplier seen. I don't know how valid this is, but I've repeated it enough, so therefore it must be valid now.

David: It's never stopped you before.

Blair: [chuckles] The pseudoscientist. Ability is a multiplier of motivation, but if we describe or define motivation and ability, ability is really the answer to the question, can you do this? Is this something that you are able to do? Motivation is the answer to the question, will you do this? Whether it's a sales plan, it's a marketing plan, whatever kind of plan it is, whatever you're planning for, you or some other person to do, you're writing this plan thinking, well, they can do this. The bigger question is, will you do this?

I think back to these plans that you mentioned in the 100 page range. What do you think the reason is that these plans didn't execute it? Maybe there are too complex, too wordy, it's just a high volume of work and not a lot of thought. At the end of the day, I think there's this desire or request via the plan, for people to do a whole bunch of things that they are able to do, but they're not going to do them.

David: You do think that motivation, that's the problem more than ability?

Blair: Yes. Ability, we're talking about marketing. How hard can it be? [laughs]

David: It's what you do for a living for your clients, right? In general, so you better be able to do it. It's the motivation.

Blair: That was a little shot to the listener. No, there are some aspects of marketing that are hard and the lead generation type of marketing we're talking about, say, getting on a stage. That's intuitive and comfortable to some people and some people are horrified by it. How hard is it? Everybody can do it, but some people really don't want to do it. As you pointed out, if I gave you a lead gen plan that said, "David, I want you to make 16 phone calls a day," you're not going to do it, even though you're perfectly capable of doing it.

David: Right. This is a side. We're taking a detour here, but what is it that motivates people to do marketing? Obviously some glaring need in their business, like they need more business, but is there something deeper there? I don't have an answer to that question. I'm just curious, it's like, what gets people off the couch to do it other than their back is against the wall? It seems like some people have a deeper motivation that's more disciplined than that, like they hate desperation, they love options. I'm just wondering how we unpack the motivation for people here.

Blair: Yes, and it might fall into what we're going to talk about next in terms of how people are motivated. The need to eat is a profound motivator, but when you're putting food on the table and you're whatever comfortable level of success is, or maybe slightly uncomfortable, yes, it's fine, but I wish there was more. When you're at that level of success, different people are going to step up and do marketing for different reasons because we're all wired differently. Unless you had an answer to that question, you were hoping I would or wouldn't hit. What do you think? Do you think there's another motivation we haven't considered?

David: I feel like there's something deeper going on here that I'd love to think more about and I haven't collected my thoughts on it. I don't know. I was just curious if you had something because here we're talking about two things that equal performance, motivation and ability. We're leaving ability behind and we're assuming that people have that ability and you want to unpack motivation a little bit more and what you're saying is that motivation needs to be understood individually in order to get a marketing plan that's actually actionable.

Blair: Yes, if I'm going to create a marketing plan for you, it would be helpful for me to know what you like to do, what you are willing to do, because there's so many different ways to skin a cat. When it comes to lead generation, there's so many things that you could do. Now those 93 and 120-something page marketing plans that you referenced, they're probably guilty of just listing everything that could possibly be done without some deep consideration of what's the most appropriate thing for this firm? Then what's the most appropriate thing or things, set of activities and tasks, for the individuals to whom these tasks will be assigned. That's where I want to go deep.

David: Right, because otherwise those long marketing plans feel to me like they're throwing things at the wall hoping something will stick, instead of concentrating on what you're talking about. What does this firm need and what motivates this particular person? How do you break these down? What are the different broad categories here?

Blair: Okay, so here's a thought experiment I'll give to the audience that I've given to, I don't know, hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Imagine three lead generation "tools" and I have tools in air quotes. These tools are on the table in front of you and I say to you, "You can only use one tool." You think of all of the leads that you need to drive to achieve your growth goals, whatever they are. You do the rough approximate math. You need a certain volume of leads, a certain percentage of those will turn into a certain amount of revenue. You think of your growth goals, you think of the leads that you'll need and you're looking at these three tools on the table in front of you and I say to you, you can only pick one tool.

This is a constraint driven exercise. You can only pick one tool, which one do you pick? I'll describe the tools in a minute but I'll just point out there's no wrong answer. You're really balancing what you think will work, with what you will do. I want to know which tool do you gravitate to, because I can make a case that you can achieve success with just any one of these tools. Here are the tools. The first one, speaking and writing. Now clearly as I described the tool, that's really a tool set. It's a massive tool set. Speaking and/or writing is tool number one.

Number two is networking, and I mean at events in person and/or online. Number three, unsolicited outreach. Email, phone calls, direct messages on social media, however you want to do it. The tools again, speaking and/or writing, number one. Number two, networking at events and/or online. Number three, unsolicited outreach. I want the listener to take a minute and think, okay, if I could only use one of those tools to drive all the leads required to achieve my growth goals, which one am I going to choose?

Now that you've chosen one, go ahead and add a second one. Now you have prioritized that list based on, my assumption is and I'm generally correct, and won't always be correct, based on your motivational makeup.

David: Right, you would choose one for yourself, right?

Blair: Yes, and you?

David: Speaking and/or writing, the same thing, yes. Then number two, my second one, my B plan would probably be number two, networking at events or online, like participating in LinkedIn for instance. Who picks number three first? Who picks unsolicited outreach?

Blair: Highly competitive people who have high achievement needs and who look at the list and think, "Okay, I understand the appeal of speaking and writing and networking, but I'm in a hurry. I want to achieve my goals quickly. I'm going to do the less desirable but more immediate tasks. More immediately fulfilling or rewarding tasks of unsolicited outreach."

David: Wow. I admire those people.

Blair: I do too.

David: I am not one of them.

Blair: I would place that second, even though you and I are wired to the same extent because we've tested this when it comes to network, when it comes to the need for affinity or affiliation. It's low in both of us. I just abhor the idea of networking. I like going to events. I like meeting people, but going to an event thinking I'm going to actively network. I would rather cold email people than I would build an approach around networking.

David: Yes.

Blair: Now, I'm not right and it's not that unsolicited outreach is better. It's better in some ways and it's worse in other ways and we could talk about that in a few minutes Now this is just a personal preference. What are the things that I'm going to do? Yes, I'm going to speak and write. I see myself as a writer and other reasons we'll get into here, I know I'm going to do that work The challenge is if you chose that tool, the first tool of speaking and/or writing, these are high-status, low-immediacy activities.

I did a talk this morning to a group in the UK and I made this point and I said, "You want to be seen as the expert in your space. You want to drive inbound inquiries? Maybe you decide to write the definitive book on your area of expertise. Maybe you'll get that book finished in two years, maybe. I've learned it takes me four years to write a book. Four painful years, and then another year to get that book out into the marketplace, and then maybe three and a half years since the day that you started, maybe it's driving leads. Now speaking works quicker than that, but these are high-status, low-immediacy activities. We'll come back to that.

David: Yes. When you look across an audience, let's just say that most of the people listening to us are running firms, so they're entrepreneurs. Would you imagine that people would choose these in roughly equal groups or not?

Blair: That's a good question. I think it depends on that sample, depends on the group. If we just took all entrepreneurs, all creative entrepreneurs, I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be roughly equal.

David: Yes, okay. This is the test, speaking and/or writing. Second would be networking at events and/or online, and then third would be unsolicited outreach, email, phone calls and so on, direct messages. How do you match these to motivation, so pay this off? How does this relate to how people are built and so on?

Blair: I'm a big fan of what's known as McClellan's needs theory of motivation or the three needs theory of motivation. I'm sure I've talked about it a few times on other episodes. What this model says or what this theory says, is people are primarily motivated by three different things. One is the need for power, one is the need for affinity, and one is the need for achievement. McClellan lists them in reverse order, I think. Power is the need for authority and respect, affinity is the need to connect with others and to like and be liked by others, and achievement is as it sounds, the need for success, accomplishing one's goals.

I've devised this three lead generation tool thought experiment to line up with the McClellan's three needs of motivation. If you chose speaking and writing, you probably, like me, have a high need for power, authority and respect. The podium and the pan, you gravitate, maybe not both. Just because you have high power needs doesn't mean you're comfortable speaking or writing. There's things going on there beyond just your motivational makeup. You might have a strong preference for one over the other. I really enjoy both. I think you do too. Is that right?

David: Yes, it is.

Blair: If you have a high need for affinity, then it's really important to you to see the whites of the eyes of the people you're going to do business with. You want to like them. You want to connect them. Business is very personal to you, therefore you are a natural networker. If you have a high need for achievement, you look at the most immediate fruit bearing tasks of direct outreach and you say, well, that's the obvious one and I'm not going to shirk from that, so I'm going to go do the thing that is most immediately successful. Generally speaking, I'm pretty comfortable with the generalization that I can give you this test and I can get a rough sense of your motivational makeup based on which tool that you've chosen

David: If the firm has written a long marketing plan that touches on all of these things, would it be fair to assume that the things that are actually going to happen. They have the ability to do all these things, but the motivation is going to pull them towards doing the thing that drives them as a person. That would mean that maybe two-thirds of the marketing plan isn't done because they're not drawn to that.

Blair: Yes, exactly. Now, these three lead generation tools of the podium and the pen, networking and direct outreach, they're not the only three tools available to you, but they're the three tools that tell me most about your motivational makeup. I haven't talked about paid media, haven't talked about sponsorship, all kinds of other things. Most of the things that I've left out are the things that don't depend so much on a person's motivation, as they do on their ability to simply manage a project.

David: Right.

Blair: You come up with your first draft of your lead generation plan, and if it's just you, or you're the only one executing the plan, then you look at this draft that you've come up with and ask yourself, what's the most interesting to you? What's the one that you want to do? If you say, "I love networking. I'm so good at being in a room. When I'm in a room at a conference with somebody, I end up taking a bunch of people out for dinner. Some of those people end up buying from us. I stay in touch with them, like, that's my thing." Then I would say, well, why don't you double down on that? The tool that you place third on your list, maybe it was direct outreach. Why don't you just take that off the table for yourself?

You can keep it into the plan, but the tool that falls under whatever was number three for you, who are we kidding here? You're not going to do them. Can we just admit that you're not going to do them?

David: Yes.

Blair: A, take them out of the plan, or B, assign them to somebody who will do them.

David: Right.

Blair: I make the point in this article that it feels like I'm giving you permission to just skip the vegetables, skip the broccoli and go right to the peach cobbler. I also make the point that your broccoli is somebody else's peach cobbler. Just because you're not going to do it, doesn't mean somebody else isn't going to do it. Is there somebody else in the team that can do this? If there's not somebody else on the team, just farm it out. Pay somebody from the outside to do it.

David: Do you feel like the principal, or at least one of the principals in a two or three partner firm, needs to be doing one of these anyway?

Blair: I think I see a pattern and you may have studied it more scientifically than I have. In any firm that's got multiple partners, usually one is just kick ass at business development. Then I would further wager that they're not great at all the different aspects of business development. They're good at the podium and the pen or networking. They've got the golf membership and they have these deep relationships and their friends end up hiring them, or they're a force of nature when it comes to selling and they're pretty good at outreach.

David: I want to go back to a point that you alluded to just a minute ago. These are the three sort of big tentpoles that sort of hold things up. Underneath all this, there can be other things that can be happening that will deliver opportunity to you in a way. I guess you would make those decisions based on whether you have more time or more money and also, what's the nature of your focus? That would have something to do with whether it's an ad spend on LinkedIn or whatever it is. That stuff can happen underneath. Is there much difference in those things that happen underneath or is those pretty much the same regardless of the personality of the principal?

Blair: Speaking and writing, networking and outreach, think of those as the, you call them tentpoles and they might be tentpoles. To me, they're the ones that are most motivationally dependent and everything else that I can think of, I think, oh yes, that's just project management. Project management isn't one of my strengths. If you give me some detailed elaborate plan that requires a lot of project management, it's not likely to get executed, but there are people on your team who have great project management skills. I think that's a pretty easy one. I do want to point out too, that you recently published a post that talks a little bit about this as well.

It's called marketing is essentially about fame. In that, one of the many great points you make is-- I think you just hit on this. I just wanted to go deeper into it a little bit. There is something about what it is that you do that should imply some obvious lead generation tactics and should negate some as well. If your audience is Fortune 500 CEOs, these are difficult people to get to. Posting on Facebook or TikTok probably is not the domain for you. You want to write for Harvard Business Review or speak at certain Davos or whatever, some highfalutin conferences. There is that element that people have to consider. I just haven't gone there in this post.

David: Yes. If your focus is fashion or motion picture stuff, they're probably not going to read a blog post of 2,600 words or something like that. Is there something about where a firm is in its chronological history, where somebody might be drawn to writing, that first one, writing and speaking, but maybe there aren't the opportunities and they do something else and then they land on that eventually? Or can they pick something that's pretty much going to be there regardless of where they are in their firm's history?

Blair: You and I have talked about this in numerous conversations. Some of them may have been recorded as podcasts, but this idea of your lead generation or sometimes we call it marketing plan, but it can encompass things beyond marketing. In the early days of the business, it really is like a flywheel. It's like a lead generation flywheel. The amount of effort that it takes to move that flywheel initially is substantial. You really lean your shoulder into it. You do a lot of hard work. The hard work can be up and down what I think of as the ladder of lead generation.

You start the high-status, low-immediacy activities. Let's say you chose speaking and writing as your number one tool, as you and I have. You start these activities early. When I launched my business, the first thing I did is I just sat down and wrote. I ended up writing a book and then I ended up writing blog posts. I'm a writer. I think through my fingers. The first thing that I'm going to do is write. The second thing I did is look for speaking engagements where I could get on stage and speak to those things that I've written about.

I worked on that immediately even before I launched the business. The day I launched my business, that very day, I remember it like it was yesterday. I had a massive email list. This was 2002. People actually replied to your emails back then. Day one was just a series of outbound unsolicited outreach. I built the early days of the business based on unsolicited outreach and I built the long-term basis of the business based on speaking and writing.

David: Right. You talk about that in The Ladder of Lead Generation, where you climb as high as you can at the beginning like you did with cold outreach. Some other stuff wasn't available to you at the time. Then you swap that out as you climb that ladder later.

Blair: Yes, I talk about this in more detail in my new book, The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise. We recently did an episode on that. It's out now, everywhere fine books are bought, meaning Amazon. I unpack this idea of The Ladder of Lead Generation, where you put all the lead generation-- I think we've done an episode on this too. You take all your lead generation activities and you can put them basically on three rungs. The highest rung is a high status activity. The low rung is the lowest status activities. The trade-off with high status tends to be low immediacy, with low status tends to be high immediacy.

You really want a balanced lead generation plan, kind of as I've described how I launched my business in 2002. You have to do the immediate stuff because you need leads today, right? Basically I'm making the mistake of assuming everybody's wired like me and that you should do these things. If you don't do them, maybe there's somebody else in the organization who can do them. It's best to have a balanced lead generation plan where you're doing things across the ladder of lead generation. You're generating high status activities, leads in the future, but you're getting leads now.

David: What I'm taking away from this episode is I'm in a firm, we're writing the marketing plan for ourselves, and I see what I've assigned myself to do and I'm just dreading it. That is not going to happen. The typical response is like, "Well, get over it, be disciplined, do what you should, do what the firm needs of you." That's not necessarily the right approach. Land on something that you're actually excited about.

Blair: Yes. Play to your strengths. Strategic coach founder, Dan Sullivan, has this great line. He's got many great lines but this, "If you keep working on improving your weaknesses, you're going to end up with some strong weaknesses." Which I think is as funny as he means it to be. Play to your strengths. Why try to get better at doing something you don't even want to do? If you're honest with yourself, you know you're not going to do it. Focus on the things that you will do. If you double down on that, and if you have more immediate needs or whatever's missing, just accept that they need to be done, but you're not the person to do them.

David: There's a sigh of relief everywhere, as Blair says, cobbler for everyone.

Blair: Remember, your broccoli is somebody else's cobbler.

David: I don't know if that's true, but we'll just end on that. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.