Episode 13: Scorecard Marketing- The four step playbook for getting better leads and bigger profits

In this episode I review Scorecard Marketing by Daniel Priestley and Glenn Carlson.

The book explores one of the biggest challenges every business faces: generating a consistent flow of quality leads. We discuss why people really buy, the psychology of "dormant" problems, how great questions uncover opportunities, the importance of warming up prospects through content, and the three psychological ingredients behind every successful sale.

Whether you're a business owner, salesperson, coach, or simply interested in understanding why customers make the decisions they do, this episode is packed with practical ideas you can start applying straight away.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, my name is Yossi Goldberg. Welcome to the Business Book Club Podcast. I'm a business coach working with business owners to help them gain clarity, solve problems, and move their businesses forward. In this podcast, I take some of the most influential business and personal development books and explore the key ideas that can actually make a difference in real life and in real businesses. In each episode, we unpack the practical insights from each book and discuss how they apply to leadership, personal and business growth, and building better businesses. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to episode 13 of the Business Book Club Podcast. I have an apology to make. I know that especially when you're small and just starting out in the podcasting space like I am, consistency is everything. When I launched this podcast, I committed to sharing insights from a business book every single week. And you know, along the way, quite a few people asked me how I was managing to get through so many books so quickly. The honest answer is I wasn't reading every single book from scratch because I had books that I had already read in the past, so I just needed to skim back through them to refresh my memory and revisit the key points I wanted to share, which made it possible to keep up with the pace. Even though it does normally take me a couple of weeks to get through a book properly. But after my 12th podcast, as I started the book that I'm still currently in the middle of, I failed. As simple as that. I failed to keep up the pace. Life got in the way, business got busy, and I didn't have the time to finish reading that book to prepare for the next episode. The truth is, I still haven't finished the book. It's a hefty one. It's a good book, but I'm still making my way through it. But in the meantime, I thought I can't leave you guys in the lurch. I want to keep these podcasts coming. So I picked up a much smaller book, which is still a very valuable one, and that's the book we're going to be reviewing today, because I was able to read it and get through it much more quickly. But if there is a lesson to be taken from this, my friends, it is don't let your ambition get the better of you. Just because you might be concerned, will I be able to keep it up? Don't let that stop you starting. Today's book is called Scorecard Marketing, the four-step playbook for getting better leads and bigger profits by Daniel Priestley and Glenn Carlson. As a caveat, I just want to put this out there. The book is built around the software platform that Daniel Priestley has created and developed and sells, and it's called ScoreApp. ScoreApp. If you're not familiar with it, I suggest that you Google it because it is a tremendously helpful resource if you're interested in lead generation, which can take place through quizzes, assessments, feedback, similar tools. And this book essentially, in its second half, takes you through how to set up your profile, how to set up your page on this app in a very easy way that can be most effective. But that's not the part of the book that I'm going to be sharing today, because that's basically a guide to setting yourself up on the platform. So go ahead, Google ScoreApp, and check it out. And I won't get a commission for it. So be it be my guest. But it's the first half of the book where the authors explain the principles upon which the software is based on, and these principles get to the heart of effective marketing and sales. As the quote on the front cover from Jake Mason, founder of Incloop, says, This will permanently transform your marketing results. So having read this book, I can tell you there are some excellent insights in this book. Starting with the fundamentals, it walks you right through what it means to reach people, how to engage with them effectively, and how to move them towards becoming customers. That's what I want to focus on on this podcast today. That's what I want to share with you. The very opening of the book, in the introduction, speaks to something which is so simple it almost feels silly to talk about. But I actually think it does need talking about. The first rule of business is you need leads. You need people in your world who could potentially buy what you're selling. There's no point coming up with a product or a service which is excellent, but you simply can't generate leads of interest to it. And the truth is, the most valuable leads are what's called warm leads. The authors define a warm lead as follows. A warm lead is someone who has given you a signal of interest. So obviously, they they're not sold yet, they're not a customer, they're just about a prospect. But that's all it takes. They might have just simply given you their contact details, they might have expressed an interest on some level with something that you've said, but whatever it is, they've demonstrated that they're interested, and that's what makes them a warm lead. The more warm leads you can generate, the more successful your business can become. He makes the point now when he goes around raising investment for any business that he's into, investors always want to know one thing: how are you going to generate leads and make sales? If you're able to demonstrate the skill, you're able to consistently bring people into your ideas. That knowledge, knowing how to generate leads, makes you several steps ahead of other people who may even have a better product or an excellent service, but because they've no idea how to get it in front of people, they fall behind. If they can't generate leads, the product doesn't matter. He makes a very interesting point, actually, because we're used to in modern-day speak, there's a term called gross domestic product, GDP, which is often used as a measure of how an economy is doing, which is based on how much it can produce. But he argues that this idea is dated, it comes from a time when manufacturing was a bit rare. Only certain companies or industries had the ability to produce things efficiently, so those who could manufacture well therefore made a lot of money. But he argues, Daniel Priestley argues, that's no longer the world that we live in. Today it's so easy to make things, and consumers are drowning in choice. If you want a proof of this, he recommends going onto Amazon, just type in the word scissors, and you'll get page after page after page of options, endless number of sellers who will be selling you all sorts of types of scissors. So today, he argues the real competitive advantage isn't simply being able to produce something. The key question is can you sell it? If you're able to consistently generate people who are interested in what you have to offer, then you're already steps ahead of any competition. To get into the psychology of why people buy, the authors argue that there's something you really need to understand about what goes on beneath the surface. People buy because of psychological tension. In other words, people experience a tension between what they have and what they want. They're living in their current reality, but they have a desired result that's different. One that they believe would be better for them. If you're trying to sell someone something, you have to understand that in order for them to buy, they need to see what you're offering as the thing that will help bridge that gap. It has to be the thing that makes their problem go away or moves them closer to the life they want. Which is why, if all you've done in your sales pitch is spend time talking about the great features of your product, the competitive price, or you're getting busy and down in the weed with payment terms, you've completely ignored the psychological tension that they're experiencing, you're not going to be a very effective salesperson. He quotes a statistic from a 2022 Salesforce article, which claims that 84% of consumers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is important to winning their business. You just have to treat people like people. And that means that if you want to become effective at marketing and at sales, you have to find a way to get beneath the surface. You need to understand what's really going on. What are people really experiencing? What is the psychological tension that they are grappling with? And when you're able to understand that, that allows you to position your product or service as the solution to their psychological tension. But perhaps I think what might be the most empowering point in this book, and certainly enlightening, is the next point which follows on from this. The authors argue that people often experience psychological tension that sits deep beneath the surface. It's called a dormant tension. Now he argues there may be many reasons for this. They might have tried to solve the problem before and it didn't work, so they just put it to the back of their mind. Maybe it's not painful enough right now, so they don't pay too much attention to it. Maybe they think it's gonna cost too much money or require too much effort. Or maybe they just don't think of themselves as capable of being able to sort it out. Whatever the reason, people carry tensions beneath the surface. They're not gonna come out with it straight away. And he gives a brilliant analogy for this. Imagine you go to a football match and you ask the whole stadium, who here is currently looking to buy a new car? Very few people would put their hand up. But if you ask a different question, who here isn't a hundred percent happy with the car that they have? Almost everyone would respond. And what that shows you is there's a dormant tension there. If you're able to identify the dormant tension that people have tucked away in the back of their minds, something that they're living with but not actively thinking about, you're in the ideal environment for selling. Daniel Priestley writes, it seems counterintuitive, but when a customer is already actively looking for a product, they're harder to sell to, not easier. You'd think that if someone's interested straight up, then great, you've got someone to sell to. But actually, he argues that people who are actively shopping already for it, they've probably made up their minds what they want. They've set their budget, they've narrowed down their options, they probably have certain brands in mind or fixed ideas about who they want to buy from. So they're much less open. But if you get in front of someone or you discover someone who has a dormant desire, the authors argue that people tend to buy from a business that help them discover that dormant desire. Isn't that remarkable? And as a coach, I find this point particularly powerful. See if I have a conversation with someone that through the conversation it helps them realize and articulate what's bothering them, what they actually want. They start to see the psychological tension beneath the surface. Then later, when I can come in and offer them a way forward by them working with me, they're much more likely to take that step because I was the one who brought them that clarity to begin with. He also argues that people who have dormant frustrations are generally much more open to exploring ideas and considering different options. So, as he writes, the smartest entrepreneurs and marketing professionals sell to those with dormant needs and wants. They go looking for the underlying psychological tension that has not yet fully formed, and they then warm the people up. So, what does this all come down to? They argue in the book, it comes down to asking the right questions. So he gives the example of someone who you barely know. If you were to walk over to them and say straight out, are you happy with your fitness? Or are you happy with your weight? You're not going to win many friends that way. No one's going to open up to that. But what if you just asked, Do you work out? Do you have any sporting hobbies? As a starter, they are gen gentle, natural questions that any person being interested in anyone else would ask. So by you being polite and genuine in that way, you're starting a conversation which can lead down a path of uncovering dormant psychological tensions that lie beneath the surface. And that is what effective marketing and selling is all about. It's not about convincing people they have a problem. It's not even about convincing people that your solution is amazing because, and you list all the great detail about the solution, it's about asking the right questions so that they discover for themselves the tension that's there, and they lean into your solution for it. This leads us to the next point, which is as the psychological tension starts to build, the person becomes more aware of it. What they're doing is they're looking for solutions. So you start by talking to someone who isn't even aware of the psychological tension, they don't realize they have a problem, which means at that point they're not looking for the solution you have to offer. And what you need to do in this process is you need to warm them up. The authors argue that one of the most effective ways of warming people up is by consistently producing relevant content. When people consume your content, and they argue from statistics that you need a person, a potential client to consume potentially 11 pieces of content before they trust you. But once they start consuming their content, they get to know you, they begin to connect to you, they become more familiar with what you have to offer. They see you as someone who might be worth listening to, someone who they can turn to for help. And today, it's never been easier to produce content. You can produce videos, you can write articles, you can post images, you can do podcasts, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or whatever platform is most relevant to your audience. Just put yourself out there and consistently drip feed your expertise and the value you can offer. And what that does is over time it will warm people up, it builds familiarity, it builds trust, it builds credibility. You become a person who they're comfortable speaking to and ultimately buying from. The next chapter is called The Product for Prospects, and it talks about something that if you've been on LinkedIn, you almost certainly have come across, and you may have very well attended one or more of these types of things. I certainly have. So it's all free, and about taking away any barriers to entry. At the same time, you're naturally going to attract people who can be warmed up because they're interested in the topic that you're putting out there. And there's so many different ways of doing this because you can do a workshop, a webinar, a book, a report, an event, a sample pack. There's so many different ways you can share a free resource with a potential client so that they see there's value to be gotten and they express an interest on some level, and um they are people who become warm clients as a result. The disadvantage is that it doesn't tell you very much about the people who turned up. So you could have someone sitting in your audience who's more than happy and more than willing to spend a lot of money on a product that you would want to sell, and likewise you could have someone who's sitting there who can't put two cents together, who doesn't who's homeless. You wouldn't know. So it's going to be a challenge to find the right balance of offering a free resource that will bring people into your world, and then also learning enough about them so that you can identify who's a good fit. Now, obviously, the book in the second half goes on to say how score app essentially achieves that, but that's not the point of this podcast. The next section of the book is looks at the makeup of a sale, and you'll probably have come across this in other places, but I feel they put this across in very simple and easy to understand terms. The authors argue that there are three psychological ingredients required for every single sale, and they are emotion, logic, and urgency. People need to feel emotionally connected to what you're offering, they need practical reasons to justify the purchase, so something like an ROI, return on investment, and they need to feel the urgency that they need to take action now, that there's a reason to take action now. We've discussed this point previously on a podcast about Alex Hamozi's approach, how to go about creating urgency. But a simple example is to make a particular price or offer available for a limited period of time, which gets them over the line quicker. But one of the ways that the authors suggest integrating emotion and logic in your sales process is a way which I use as well, is by quantifying a situation. They say, look at a doctor, a doctor might ask on a scale of one to ten, how painful is it? And what that does is it engages the emotion which feels the pain and the logic which quantifies the pain simultaneously. So I use this in my own sales calls because after doing the diagnosis and you've built a relationship and I'm presenting a solution, I want to know where they are in their relationship to this idea. So I'll say to them on a scale of one to ten, how interested are you? Alex Emoji says, you can say it the other way around. Um, how not interested are you? Or when they give a number, more like when they give a number, so they'll say to you they're at a seven. So the follow-up question in my in my book is Um, well, what can I say, or what you what are you interested in? What do you need to hear that will bring you to closer to a 10, right? The other way of doing it, Alex Emoji says, is to ask, why are you not a zero? And they'll give you the reason why they're not a zero, and you can then build on that to say, well, then that's great, because that's that they're telling you essentially what they find valuable, right? But leaving aside that point, just the idea that you're using the metric of scaling one to ten um means you're tapping into both the emotion and also the logic. They quote uh another Salesforce statistic, which is 70% of consumers feel a company's understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty. People want to feel understood. If you approach every sale with these three psychological elements, emotion, logic, and urgency in mind, then you put yourself in a much stronger position because people will get the sense that you're out for them, that you care about them, that you're listening to them, and that you're reflecting their reality. The final point I'm going to share from this book, and as I say, it's only the first half of it, is the point that people want to take the path of least resistance. The authors remind us that your customers are busy, they have full, complicated lives, they just want results, they don't want to get stuck along the way. If you're offering them a route that gets them these results, faster, cheaper, less stressful, or just easier, then it's going to be far more appealing. And he says there's a number of ways of demonstrating to a potential client how you're able to do this. One of the ways is to share your methodology. So say that you've got you've developed a repeatable process that's worked for so many hundreds of people before, and just follow the methodology and you'll get there, right? That gives people confidence that this is an easier route. Alternatively, you can talk about the way you package your product and service and present it in a way that they can see it's step one, two, three, and then you end up with your result. The key is however you show your prospects what you what you intend to do, and however you decide to explain the path of least resistance, what you've got to do is make sure not to overcomplicate your offer. As the authors put it, your customer doesn't want more stuff cluttering up their space, they don't want more meetings filling up their diary, they don't want more information giving them a headache. Right? They just want to be simple, they want to be given something that's simple and effective. There is one more point, though, to be honest, that I think it comes from later on in the book, which I really feel ties everything nicely up together. And I'm going to quote from later on, they write, some of the best clients you will ever have start off feeling hesitant about what you do. They will need some convincing, they will need to know you care enough to call them, they need to know you're confident that they can do it because they think they can't. And I think this is such an important reminder. At the end of the day, whatever you're selling, you're dealing with human beings. If you take on board everything we've spoken about today and you approach people with genuine care, with interest, with curiosity, rather than simply thinking, how can I make this sale? How can I get their money in my pocket? You're thinking about them. You're thinking about a conversation that is to their benefit, awakening dormant psychological tensions. That's the route to a successful sale. That's all for me today. As I said at the beginning, I'm working my way through the next book as quickly as I can so I can bring you the next episode of the Business Book Club podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support my work, I'd really appreciate it if you could like, share, and subscribe this podcast episode. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.