The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
Are Referrals Still Worth It in Today's Market?
Discover the secret to building business connections that last. Join us for an engaging conversation on the importance of networking and relationship-building in the photography and branding industries. Tune in as we discuss how attending events, like the Professional Photographers of America convention, can open doors to new opportunities and help you understand client visions for successful creative solutions. We also examine the delicate balance between relying on recurring revenue and continually fostering fresh connections to avoid falling into the trap of complacency.
Explore the art of negotiation and the power of referrals in transforming your sales strategy. We delve into the contrasting methods of farming versus hunting for clients and the role of digital marketing in the modern business landscape. Hear our insights on why developing sales skills is crucial, highlighted by a powerful quote: "A person who hates to sell will never be rich because they only enjoy to buy." Listen as we share our cultural experiences with haggling and the frustrations of competing with cheaper alternatives without negotiating value, all while emphasizing the importance of trust in client relationships.
Finally, we touch on the nuances of branding and perception. Learn how to attract clients who align with your values and create a brand that resonates emotionally with your audience. Discover ways to offer pricing flexibility without compromising the quality of your services, as we explore strategies for maintaining integrity in the branding process while accommodating client budget constraints. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clearer understanding of how to navigate the complex world of branding, sales, and client relationships with confidence and clarity.
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Back in college. You're dating a girl, or whatever. You're a good dude and then she's all wishy-washy and then she goes off and she dates a bald-headed blacker dude who's a douchebag and you're like why would you do that? He's like, he makes you feel like shit, tom.
Speaker 2:Requests for proposals are very big in government. Just bidding. Basically, it's bidding, isn't?
Speaker 1:that the connection, connection, the networking is so valuable. Um in in, uh, business, right, because, um, I'm just seeing this now. I mean I signed up for it's called ppa, which is professional photographers of america, and usually it's like 435 dollars. I think some people look at it. They have this expectation they buy this, they're going to be the next big you know business person, but that's really not it. It's really just you're, they're going to be the next big you know business person, but that's really not it.
Speaker 1:It's really just you're basically spending the money to be able to go to conventions, to meetups, to networking, to where you can meet people to make a sale. You know, if you spend $500 a year and you make just one sale for $500, you pay for it. Essentially right, but for me it was like 80 bucks as a student. And then the conviction convention I can't say that word today is in dallas in february. It's usually like 300. It's free for students because I'm going to asu now, uh, or this fall and uh I was like yeah, man, that's, that's a no-brainer.
Speaker 2:Pay a little money, meet people I still have my asu id in my wallet from when I graduated 14 years ago and I still use it to get discount.
Speaker 1:I love it, man, I love it.
Speaker 2:Photography is actually very similar to our branding and web development side, because there's a very big creative component around all three of those right when you need certain types of people to do creative and leadership type situations. So a goal for you would probably be it's going to take you a while to learn and understand how to grow it. I've learned from the branding side because we do something very similar. We don't create photography. I'll bring photographers on if needed. We don't create photography. I'll bring photographers on if needed. But we focus very heavily on the identity and how the website is meant to be positioned to an audience, and so we'll focus on helping them define that vision and that mission and how that relates to the visual side of the communication. We'll create the visual side Websites very similar. I don't just create websites. It's like we have to sit down and we have to figure out the communication. We'll create the visual side Websites very similar. I don't just create websites. It's like we have to sit down and we have to figure out the roadmap that takes leadership. We have to sit down and be like what are we going to do here, here and here? What's the purpose for this? What's the purpose on why someone would want to come to your site, Make sure it matches your position. I'm not going to get into the digital marketing side because that's a whole different ballgame, but it's a similar concept, as we are creating creative solutions around marketing side is that like oh, these types of people aren't really online Like our big client in the gym space.
Speaker 2:She's the, she's the. I think she's now the CMO. She's the CMO of of uh, we work with crunch. It doesn't I can say who they are. Um, we're with crunch and she's a CMO at crunch. And um, you think she found me through through uh online. Well, her marketing manager did actually funny enough, but she didn't do the work. She sent it to her, her her marketing manager, and the marketing manager is the one that found me. And so you have to think about your audience. But where am I more likely going to meet that type of person? I'm not going to meet them online. I'm not going to meet them through just putting up a form and saying this.
Speaker 2:If I wanted to meet her directly, I'd probably have to go to an event, build a relationship with her, and so branding in itself, branding in in itself in those larger web jobs it is about the connection you have to. In photography type jobs, you have to meet people, build connections. Yeah, you know, grow um and as much as people and here's something I think that is a good common practice for anyone who's in the field or are really thriving on I need to build reoccurring revenue. I think it's funny because I took a complete opposite approach to what happens to most people. Most people come on and they're like they start building these projects out. 60, 70. I mean large branding firms can charge anywhere 100 grand. I mean I know I don't know her personally, but I follow her. She sells 500K branding packages, vision packages for large leadership organizations. Hopefully, eventually I'll get there. It's probably going to take me a long time, but she's not going to sell them online. She's going to have to go meet somebody. She's going to have to build a relationship with them, build a connection. But I, unfortunately, with my security side of of the needs that I wanted was like I need to build reoccurring right now, like I need reoccurring, I want it stable.
Speaker 2:What happens with the reoccurring if not done right is you don't build those connections, you get comfortable real easily. You get complacent. You get complacent. It's very easy to get complacent when you're making 30, 40K a month. I'm not complaining, but kind of am. But you have a client that you've had for five, six years, that you've helped grow to three, four, five million dollars, and how many referrals are you really going to get out of that person? Maybe one, two if you're lucky, but you've had them for so long that you can't keep asking them over referrals. The project side, on the other hand, you're able to get. It forces you to work on your lead acquisition and your how you're going to get clients. Because reoccurring you say, oh yeah, great, Like I can go out there and I only need one. Like me personally, if I did all reoccurring, like gym marks, basically reoccurring, that's all it is. If I can go out and get one client a month sounds simple enough, right? Probably a lot harder than it seems. But you know I'd say, okay, I need to talk to 10 people a month, 10% close rate, if I'm lucky, you know, um, 20% at two would be great, but really that's all I need to get to a million. You know, that's all I would really need to get to a million is one sell a month. But they're not going to build momentum for you. You're going to have to very much so focus on the outreach and um. They're not going to build momentum for you. You're going to have to very much so focus on the outreach and um. They're not going to build that connection.
Speaker 2:Large branding firms, photography firms how do they build their clientele? I always hear it's through referrals. It's always like oh hey, like we built such a good relationship with this, and you know why? Because they do a project. It's about two to three months. They have to keep, they have to learn to keep them in a engaging pipeline of how are you doing? Let's go get coffee, do you need any more projects? You keep the relationship going or reoccurring. It's like, especially in digital marketing, is all right, we're getting you. We're doing the same thing every month to get you to the next spot. You may upsell you once you reach the next spot, but that's kind of how it works. You have a call with them, hopefully once a month or every two weeks, depending on the aggressiveness of what you're doing. You build a relationship that way but can't really ask for clients all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So could you compare it to, uh like the reoccurring customer and hunting going out in the wild? Hunting is like the one-time customer, right when when you're hunting, you're like out there. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:And you're talking about within, yeah, the terms.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just a comparison, like an analogy.
Speaker 2:You could say hunting.
Speaker 1:yeah, hunting is definitely Just take it that one kill, just that one kill. Once you get. Once you get it, take it back to base camp. You're good for a while. Yeah, it's like the farming is like you can just be there on the farm, maintain it watered here and there, throw it some.
Speaker 2:You know well and I I actually cringe when I hear, uh, when I get prospects that come on and they're like, yeah, you know, all I do is get referrals. And this other digital marketer told me like, oh, referrals is dead, you need to do everything online. And I'm like like they kind of should be part of the same thing to be, honest, you can have a.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's about sustainability. So I look at like, I look at digital marketing now as a connection, like I said earlier. But if you're going to hunt, uh, if you're going to hunt versus farm, yeah, I would rather build up a list of partners, uh like go out and find someone. If I do and that's another reason why I I had to separate out, because, being full service, I couldn't necessarily build a partnership in a certain field because I'm like, oh, we do that, uh, the coolest quote I've heard recently is if you don't like to sell, you'll never be rich, because you only enjoy to buy.
Speaker 1:And and that just really hit with me because I was oh, that's an interesting one.
Speaker 2:You should send that one to me.
Speaker 1:I wrote on the board up there a person who hates to sell will never be rich because they only enjoy to buy. I wrote it for myself, to read it. Because I wrote that's like my pitch up there in the black and then like that's what customers will.
Speaker 2:that's I'm going to take a picture of that before you go. I like that. You have everything on the board.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got that big board so I could write stuff out and then figure out like, uh, you know, I changed the pitch and I'm looking at what are they going to say back? And then I'm thinking back in my head what did they actually say? Like that right there the memory, what people have actually said back, and so I'm gonna start writing that out and then writing off a little bitty, you know, branches of like how to tackle those issues. Like you know, there's always something, some pushback from people and how to knock through those barriers.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean it's, it's, it's hard. I I always tend to get the same. I always it's. So this is an interesting one, because I was actually ranting about with my ad guy the other day about this and I'm like, because I was always very big on the give, take method and the value, I like I learned a lot about selling value. I spent two years learning how to sell that because I'm like I tried to bring salespeople in for a while but I realized that I'm like I'm at least a million dollars Like this is what I need to do now, and you just got to bootstrap it for that part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do, because it's just one of those situations where one I enjoy connection. But what I've found this is what's crazy with the society right now. No one wants to haggle anymore. I'm like I would like no man, nobody. I hate that shit.
Speaker 1:It's like now. It's like please haggle with me. So yeah, like deal man.
Speaker 2:So I've had clients that have literally ghosted me and told me and not even said no, and then they went with, like a person, company, oh, that happens all the time. But they'll like go with just the one, like ten dollars cheaper, you know, like, or like I'm not saying ten, I'm over exaggerating. But, like you know, I'll be like I'll sell like a 60,000 dollar you know branding package to them and then they'll come back and be like, oh, we went to you know, this person that was doing 45 or 50, and I'm like, and and, uh, I look at the, the company, and I'm like, do you even want to talk to me? Like we had one phone call and and we went through and we talked through, I have a discovery call. We go through their pains, we kind of understand.
Speaker 2:I like to talk through price. I'm like, what is the budget you're looking for, what is this? And I like to, yeah, anchor, I'll purposely put a price out there and I'll say you know a price a little bit higher than what we're needing, and then they'll I usually like them to come back and like, oh well, what are you looking for? Well, we don't know what we're looking for. It's like, of course you have a price written down, you have a budget. Of course you have a price. So just tell me the price.
Speaker 2:I don't say it like that, of course, but you know, like, give me a price so that I can come back and be like, all right, well, we'll do it at that price if we can make it a two-month contract instead of a one. Or how about we do 40K and we break the payment system up? Or you know like, anything that we can do, and that's how I was taught, that's how I learned. Value-based selling is the give-and-take method. Kind of do something along those realms, but no one haggles anymore. I'll literally be like 30,. I'll be like, uh, I'll literally be like 30 I'll be like 20.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's a little expensive for what I'm. Well, what are you looking for?
Speaker 1:I don't know it drives me nuts.
Speaker 2:I'm like why don't people like to haggle? I mean?
Speaker 1:so I go to uh, so I eat like heart and liver and stuff like that for the, the micronutrients from liver and stuff. So I'll go down to bay's, which is like a middle middle eastern store, and and I love it, dude, because everybody there they haggle and I think if you didn't know what haggling was or you were just a very uncomfortable person in general, you would think that they were arguing back and forth no, no, I don't want this one, I want this one, that one's bad, this one. They don't get offended, this man, he doesn't want this one and he wants that one, get that one. They just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, just haggling all the time about stuff Back and forth. Now, the price is too much. How much do you want? No, no, that's not enough, we'll go. They just back and forth, back and forth. And I love it because it's like they're coming to an agreement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're coming. That's part of building a relationship and, to be honest, I think it's part of trust too, because it shows and I mean, yeah, you're right, I think that some people don't know how to haggle no-transcript Like but, but I wish I, I I'm telling everyone, like if anyone was coming to me and they want to haggle or they do this, and this is something that bugs the crap out of me.
Speaker 2:Like we worked really hard on our, the types of people we want to come in the door. Like I on our, the types of people we want to come in the door. Like I'm sorry, I just can't help you. I can give you a referral if you want. Like I'll even. I'll even have people on the call where they're like that's just too much. Can you go any lower? If I can't go lower, but like you know what? Like I don't think you're a right fit. Like I, if you'd, like I can look through some of your competitors and I'll tell you which one would be good, because my I don't get upset when I lose a sale, because of course I want a new client, of course I want to grow. I get more upset that I know that they're making the wrong decision that is.
Speaker 1:That's me a lot too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that does um, and I'll tell them. Just let me know some of the other people you're going for and I'll tell you if they're a bit better fit than us.
Speaker 1:Oh man what if that's the emotional thing about it? Because like, uh, I gotta explain it out. So you know, like when you're, uh, back in college and you're dating a girl whatever, you're a good dude and all and then she's like I just, you know, I mean she's all wishy-washy, and then she goes off and she dates a bald-headed biker dude who's a douchebag, right, and you're like, why would you do that? He's like a piece of shit. He makes you feel like shit all the time.
Speaker 1:What if it's just like the emotional persuasion? They're really good at to where? Like you know what I'm saying? To where, like in sales, it's like I hate that because I'll have people the same way. I'll quote them a price and they ghost me or whatever. They go and they ghost me or whatever. They go with somebody who's just they just do a shit job and it bugs the hell out of me. Like dude, I could have done such a good job for you if you'd just go with me, but that other person is not good at what they do. They're just really good at convincing people yeah you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:They are really good. It's always and unfortunately it's. It's the something that's been very hard for me, because it's usually.
Speaker 2:They usually fall for the sleazy salesman tactics yeah, that's the crazy part, it's not the relationship building, and I I've come to realize, I've had to just come to realize be like hey, like it's. There's three things that are happening there. I'm like one. They have not. Like I said earlier, they have not learned the bad before they can get the good, so they need to go through that process. I mean, if a client comes to me and they're like we just want a, a logo, for instance, I'm like we don't create logos, we create brands, we create your vision. But I'll be honest, companies are in the validation phase. They don't need that yet, so they're in it, they don't. It's usually like hey, like 500 to a million when you have to create this vision or you have to evolve the vision, when you start bringing a team and a culture and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So what you're saying? To interrupt you real quick, because I think some people, when they hear this, they're not going to understand what you mean by brand. And understand what you mean, the brand is like the feel, what it makes you feel what it represents. Kind of like when you hear Nike, what it makes you feel like what it represents Apple Starbucks, whatever what it represents. Kind of like when you hear nike, what it makes you feel like what it represents, apple starbucks, whatever. To where you're saying people have a lot of revenue coming in and they want to elevate their brand. Right now you're saying they want to get more sales, they want to get they want to.
Speaker 2:They want to elevate the perception of who they are by who they are, and so a lot of it. So it really depends on if you're a personal brand or a corporate brand. But I could go as deep as saying a corporate brand is only a residence of a personal brand, because a person's going to the way they are as a person's going to evolve the business, to be honest, but uh, but yeah, it's perception, but a lot of it comes back to not just how people perceive you. I mean, yes, it's how people perceive you, but not just clients, but team um, you have to have a vision, but it's basically documenting all that. It's basically figuring out, like my vision, what I want to do for the company, what I, the values I have. Those are part, those are the intangibles of the brand. Those are like the things you don't see but still need to be developed because they're going to help you with the vision of documenting where you're going to go, where the brand and the visual side can be internal, like documents. It could be your logo, it could be your brand language, but I like to pertain it down to that subconscious feel. So it's like you drive down the street. Why do you think there's multiple gas stations in the same area? Because really there's. There's probably just going to be one or two things from a subconscious level that are going to get you to be like I'm going to go to circle k instead of shell. Yeah, so, and that doesn't have to be the logo, the. The visuals are the. The visuals are the things people assume are part of it.
Speaker 2:But it comes down to your offers, your audience, because you're gonna, you're gonna know, yeah, you're gonna know. For a gym, for instance, if you're selling, um, if you're selling to. I'll just use this as a probably very easy example for you to get. If you're a gym and you're not branded correctly, you'll start creating these offers, price points around nothing like you're just hearing me. Like all right, vision, let's guide on the streets doing $30 a month, like all right. But if your audience, if you're a yoga studio, why are you putting people of? Why are you putting weightlifting equipment in your studio? That kind of that's. It's hard to explain. But like down to your offers. Like, why do you have challenges around losing weight? That's not what yoga goers want to deal with.
Speaker 2:You need to make offers around and messaging and vision around helping that audience, and so it's like your offers, how you differentiate yourself, and the reason I think people don't get it is because I think that we have three tiers you have business, you have branding and you have marketing. People usually jump from business to marketing. I mean, I've had clients all the time that have no foundations and no branding in place and it usually ends in failure or I'm doing more work because they don't have a vision in place and it's hard for people to understand right, they're like well, I don't know what foundations are, and it's like it's really just taking everything that's in your head and finding a way to put that down so that you have a guiding path on not just the visuals but your mission and your vision and your values and you could start living by the things that really make you. And so it's and it's documenting that the only way you're going to document all that is, if you find it, I love this man.
Speaker 1:I love this.
Speaker 2:Only way you're going to find it is if you work with someone that's not just creating a logo. You know, and nothing against freelancers, they're just. They're at a certain place in their development. They're just doing the work. They're just doing the work. They're freelancers, Just do the work. Yeah, they don't have strategy involved.
Speaker 1:I was going to tell you the Circle K was a good example, because I started going to Circle K more. There's one right here in the corner because they offer the loyalty points. So it makes you feel like when you go there they're not giving you like a discount. I don't really like discounting. I think it tarnishes reputation, but I don tarnishes reputation, but I don't, I don't know that much right now, I'm just learning um, but it makes it feel like it's a trade, like I give to them by buying their gas and they give back to me by giving me a discount on the gas if I buy from them. Makes sense. Yeah, like if you come here, we'll reward you for it, type of thing. Right, it's like an incentive. Yeah, it's incentive, it's incentivized and that's that.
Speaker 2:That probably. That probably had took countless amounts of research on the type of person that buy gas from their company. And people don't see that, they don't understand they, they can't work yeah, they're back in work to figure it out which is strategy.
Speaker 2:They just for them, yeah, they have, yeah, a lot of trial and error and figuring certain things out and, yeah, there's always going to be trial and error and failure. It's part of the growth of brand, because brand is isn't just about what you do, it's about what you don't do, right? So, uh, yeah, they probably did all that, but it's it's you know. Back to your point on discounting like I'm the same way, man, if I go to a place and like a shirt's 50 bucks and then it's, I mean I'm okay if it's like 25% off. But I tell my wife all the time I'm like did you they? They mark it down, they mark it's like 50 bucks, they mark it down like 90% or something you know, and you're like did you know? That means that they're still making a profit on this.
Speaker 1:On this, shirt, that's I mean they're making.
Speaker 2:They were basically exploiting you from the get-go. So and that's why I always make fun of her when she goes to kohl's or when she goes to like one of those things they're like originally 75 bucks, but it's down to 50. I'm like, no, it was always 50. Now you're doing the reverse and you're saying it was this price. But it's your strategy is that it's this price? And I see that because I'm in marketing and you could see it too. But I think that for B2B type companies like us, discounting isn't a great thing. That's why haggling, that's why I think haggling comes into play, and it's a different give and take type method.
Speaker 1:That's what Ryan Ehler. He's a mortgage broker. He was on the podcast with me. I love Ryan. He taught me a lot of good stuff. That was a lot of valuable stuff I needed to learn. He said it was like a shopping cart. If somebody doesn't like the price of it, you got to take some stuff out of the shopping cart, put it back on the shelf. You can't just start like here's what the item is, oh, you don't like the price, let's go lower. And then you don't change anything. You have to take away some of it like okay, well, we can change this up. We won't do that. Why don't we do this instead of that? You don't need this much. We can reduce it to this that haggle back and forth, figuring out what works, but not just keeping the same item and just reducing the price because in their eyes it was it was price yeah, why was it more expensive to tell hey?
Speaker 2:there's, there's a book and it it's from a person called blair ands that the, the mat, the, the pitching manifesto, the pitching manifest, and I've read it like three or four times. Um, and I used to be very heavy into the value. I don't think value-based pricing works for digital marketing.
Speaker 1:I just don't, because it's such a number oriented thing thing, with leads and people don't get what was the name of that book?
Speaker 2:The pitching manifesto I think that's what it's called, but you'll find it it's by Blair ends Um and he comes up with the host very similar strategy and I implemented it and was doing this for a while myself. Um, I don't do it that much anymore because it like I we talked about it earlier with the digital marketing stuff. I just haven't gotten any clients in from that perspective, but it was. You have a high, medium and low offer.
Speaker 2:And you really focus on. Of course, the medium one's the one you're supposed to sell. The lower one is the lowest and large, medium or small, medium large. Yeah, and you make that, you purposely make the larger. It's not just like 10, 20, 30, for instance, it's like 5, 30 and then 8.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know a big jump from that OK.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the big jump and that's that's like the larger package, but that has that's like extreme value. You offer the world for that package and then the medium plus premium plus the world for that package, and then the medium premium plus and then the middle one's like okay, but the goal is that they're they usually and this always happened to me, it always did they always fixated on the medium one. We can't afford it. But the thing that would always happen to me is I would do that too. I would be like, all right, well, let's just take some things out every time, but we still want everything. And it's like we can't because we can't do this.
Speaker 2:And the problem with my field, anyway, is it wasn't really an all a cart right, it was. You have a process. So if you want a lower package, unfortunately our process involves, like, for instance, for our branding packages, we start with discovery and we go through a huge discovery session, uh, and then we lead into the messaging and the visuals and two separate processes and they tie in later, um, and we go down a path of like sketching stylescapes, then presentation, finalizing the presentation, and and then that's what we'll do the. We'll take this from the stylescape, we'll start designing the, the uh assets from that. If I were to take that and say, all right, and I had to do this before to cut things out, all right, we'll cut out the stylescapes, right? It ends up diluting because it's a process. It's how we come up with a process.
Speaker 1:So you're doing it from A to B, you're doing the whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have to do the whole thing, so you can't really cut out anything.
Speaker 2:To have the quality right. So how do you really? The only way you can do that is if you take a lower package and you just say, all right, well, I'm not going to give you brand guidelines. For instance, I'm going to give you, you know, a one-sheeter. We'll just come up with some colors, but we're still going to keep the sketching, we're not going to do the brand language, you. So you, there's ways you can take it out, and I'm not going to say devalue it, um, but there's ways you can make it smaller, and that's where the lower price tag comes in, right? So I think the the take things out perspective works when it comes to your pricing via an a la carte type system got it.
Speaker 1:That makes okay. So what you, what you said, makes perfect sense because you're doing, you're taking all the process for him. It's like I'm going to get you from here to here and you have to do. Even if you tell them what you do and don't have to do, you know what you have to do to get them there.
