Add Rooms To Your Life

Where do good ideas come from? This was the question Steven Johnson took four years to explore. And then distill his findings into an aptly named book: Where Good Ideas Come From.

The main takeaway, one that I recite just about once a month to the team, to myself, or to customers, is that of the “adjacent possible.” Opening doors.

The argument can be summarized in one sentence: at any given moment, there isare a set of ideas, inventions, or opportunities that are just one step away from what currently exists.

Ideas don’t just happen as lightbulb moments: they happen gradually as new steps reveal themselves.

Here’s an example:

Started with landline ->

Moved to mobile chips and batteries ->

That led to your cool flip phone ->

That led to smartphones ->

App stores: there’s an app for that ->

Ride-sharing revolution. You can now DoorDash a vanilla latte.

Travis Kalineck (Uber Founder) couldn’t go from landline to Uber. Too many rooms in between.

There were steps.

Doors to open.

Rooms to explore.

How do you harness the power of the adjacent possible? It’s simple. Open doors.

If you want to advance your career and innovate in your field, you need to ask yourself: Am I opening doors to the connecting rooms? The areas in my profession that are unknown to me and to most. Am I exploring the adjacent possible?

My goal was and still is to open doors. To operate a company on the frontiers.

Where do good ideas come from? Assuming GeoFli (change website content based on visitor location) is a good idea, the path to landing on the idea came from doing exactly this.

Here are the rooms I had to enter.

Enrollment marketing -> college fair circuit (think trade show marketing)-> digital marketing -> conversion rate optimization -> landing page builders -> personalized website traffic based on location.

Pintler Group has a core value to operate on frontiers. Another way of thinking about this: continue to open doors to rooms that didn’t exist three years ago. Or sometimes three months ago.

How to Find a Competitive Advantage:

Here’s the secret. The deeper you go and the more doors you open, the less crowded the rooms.

When you start in a career, you don’t know much. So all you can do is open doors and explore rooms. This is called gaining experience. A lot of people stop exploring. The key is to keep going.

Open doors to uncrowded rooms. This is your competitive advantage.

If the Room is Empty:

It applies to any career, passion, or area of expertise. In entrepreneurship, when I get to a room that doesn’t have a lot of people, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. It can mean a couple of things:

1. There’s actually not much happening. It smells of a college party that happened two days ago. The room used to be full. The party happened. Then ended. Think typewriter mechanics. Empty room. Not a lot of opportunity.

You could still be the best in the world in this room if that’s something that interests you. Typewriter repairman, for example.

2. You’ve actually skipped a couple of rooms. It feels empty because you’re lost. You haven’t spent enough time mastering Google Analytics and creating your own dashboards to know that it’s a solved problem. You’re in a room to build a dashboard that combines Google Ads and Meta Ads without having spent time in Data Studio (which does exactly this). Google owns this room and kicked everyone else out.

3. There’s a blue ocean here. You’ve found something that worked. There are still doors to open, but you’ve got a gut feeling there’s something here. The adjacent possible is on a frontier. And now I’m finding doors that have to be jarred open. Sometimes with a hard pull. Other times with a crowbar.

Think: building a new software to solve a pain point and combining industry knowledge with business acumen.

How this applies to building a business:

Innovate. I grew up in Rochester, NY. When I was born, the company that employed half of Rochester, Kodak, wasn’t based in Rochester: it was Rochester.

From 60,000 employees to 1,200 today (OG hipsters still use film). That leaves an impression on an entrepreneur.

When I moved to Montana and went to business school, at least three times a semester Kodak made its way into a case study, discussion or guest lecture on what NOT to do. It made books about combating complacency really fascinating to me.

The coolest part: the floor plan to explore rooms is friggin’ enormous. Like infinitely big. The AI rooms are filling rapidly. What if you do a 180? Turn around and go the other direction like this crossing guard in Burlington who makes 17k/month sending postcards. Snail mail? Really? Open the analog door. There might be some room.

How this applies to ambition:

You can be the one and only at something. The best in the world. Just keep opening doors until you’re the only one left in the room. Even if the last room is geography-based: “in Montana,” or “in my county,” or “in my school.”

How this applies to risk:

It took Alex Honnold ten years to free solo El Capitan. Started in a climbing gym. Then granite. His comfort zone expanded as he opened more doors. The adjacent possible grew. He free soloed a 100-foot wall. Then a 200 ft wall. Then familiarized himself with hundreds of routes in Yosemite. Lived in a van at the base of his objective. Expand. Expand. Expand. Until the next room was to free solo 3,000 vertical feet.

You don’t have to start a business or climb 3,000 feet without ropes. But your next good idea isn’t found in your current room. The best part? It’s highly adjacently possible that you’re a couple of doors away from an incredible career/entrepreneurial breakthrough.

The Barbell Method: Marketing at the extremes.

The Barbell Method:

Marketing The Extremes

The barbell strategy for investing comes from Nassim Taleb’s book, Black Swan. Though impossible to summarize in one sentence, I’ll give it a try. Essentially, you’re allocating money in two ends of the risk spectrum: low risk (Cash, Rental Real Estate, retirement accounts) and high risk (seed investing, startup of your own, speculative stocks).

We do this at Pintler Group to make our portfolio sturdy. Survive economic downturns while leaving the door open to an extremely high upside, and avoiding the middle entirely.

Okay. Three(ish) sentences.

I’m an entrepreneur, not a financial advisor. I’ll talk a little bit about my investment strategies, but the goal is to talk about how the barbell method can be applied to your marketing.

I’ve run a fair amount of marketing campaigns for companies of all shapes and sizes. Likely thousands of campaigns from retailers in downtown Missoula to onboarding Fortune 500 organizations with our software.

So this article is about the barbell strategy, and how I believe that if you use this concept in marketing, it can result in outsized returns. Insert marketing acronym here: ROI, ROAS, CPL, CAC. GEESH.

Below: example of a barbell investment strategy.

My Theory of the Case:

Companies rolling out the barbell marketing strategy as part of their playbook will enjoy outsized returns on their investment of time, money, and energy. And will separate themselves from the mediocre middle.

Nobody Ever Got Fired Marketing in the Middle.

Marketing in the middle (taking moderate risk investing in “proven” channels) doesn’t get you fired, but it will land you in the middle. Middle management. Middle of the road. Mediocracy.

Imagine you’re in a leadership position tasked with growing the company. Or maybe you’re the executive director of a non-profit.

I would think about allocating an annual marketing budget between the safe and the risky. All while avoiding the middle. The marketing barbell.

Barbell Summary:

Safe Marketing Activities. The “Blocking and Tackling” of Your Marketing Budget:

In investing (again, not financial advice), Taleb makes the case for allocating capital to extremely safe investments so you can weather an unforeseen black swan event: a sharp economic downturn, natural disaster, a global pandemic, or shifting macroeconomic trends.

While at the same time, having a small but focused amount of money in high-risk investments. Most may fail, but if one succeeds, there’s a tremendous upside.

Here’s how the concept can apply to your marketing.

Left Side: Blocking and Tackling

Low-frequency waves. Day after day. Month after month. Slowly compounding.

Lower Funnel Activation: Abandoned Cart Emails.

Retention Marketing: The marketing stuff that equals repeat customers.

Strong organic presence across platforms: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit (being sure not to put all your eggs in one basket).

Social Monitoring: How is your brand talked about online? Defending the moat.

Tracking net promoter scores: exceeding expectations for and delighting current customers.

Again: very little (if any) risk is involved with the above. The high-interest savings account of a marketing company.

Right Side: Low Down-side, High Up-side

Now, let’s skip the middle for now and up the risk level. It’s time to gamble.

Of course, not all speculative investments return 100x BUT, but marketers can benefit from thinking like venture capitalists who need to return a 100x fund, the VC needs a very small number of extremely successful “winners”, like one or two, depending on deal size and fund.

Highly Speculative: High Risk. High Reward:

This is where you log out of the 100k/yr attribution software. This isn’t about blended customer-acquisition-cost, seven-day-view-through-rates, or reducing the CPM on the streaming TV for the Houston market. This is about hockey stick-type results.

Let’s run through some ideas:

Unconventional PR: Doesn’t have to be jumping out of space, but it is a classic example.

Guinness World Record.

You’re a surfboard upstart (actual employee project!) You’re not going to outspend the Goliaths. You’re not going to out-impress at Outdoor Retailer. So you’ve gotta think differently. How about setting a Guinness World Record for the longest river wave session in history? This might make for some fun headlines. And the downside if it doesn’t work? You’ve got to ride a river wave for a bunch of hours.

Total Loss: 5 Hours? Maybe 25 hours? What is that current record anyway?

Creating a YouTube Series.

Again, log out of the attribution software. This one is gonna be tough to measure the immediate impact. But it’s a right-side-of-the-barbell tactic. It’s difficult to move the boulder (record the first video), but once done, the object is in motion. Here’s an example of zero-to-one with our software RevelForms. And your competition is too distracted with attribution software to grab a camera themselves.

Potential upside? A story worth telling. A captivating founder journey that builds trust, buy-in, and buy-ers.

The potential downside: you have a video series of ten videos with a combined view count of 83. On to the next idea.

Total. Loss: 10k.

*Example of RevelForms YouTube page*

In-Person Events: Large and Small

Host a small event. Pay for it all. Buy the dinner. Add real value to attendees in the form of a quick deck. Hand it out and pay for colored printing.

Upside: You’ve added a ton of value to a small but mighty curated group. You’ve surrounded yourself with people smarter than you.

Downside: You picked up the check and never hear from them again.

Total Loss: 1k-20k.

Time / Resource Allocation?

10% of marketing energy/time/resources toward low-probability-of-success but high-impact tactics.

*Shown above is our very own Ana attending Spryng by Wynter conference in Texas*

Avoid the Middle. Okay. But What’s in the Middle?

“Media Buys”

$250k into an ad campaign with too-good-to-be-true key performance indicators and an account specialist “placing media.”

Audience Expansion. The SQUIRREL! effect.

You haven’t reached 100% of your target audience. Pretend you’re a university that is known for its veterinary science program. People from all over the country apply to it. They seek it out. And you have enrollees from 46 states.

There’s the capacity to grow it to the largest in the country. The tendency at this moment is to direct your gaze to the business school program. This is the wrong tendency. This is the tendency of the middle.

Brand Awareness:

No matter how awesome it is to report 1.7 million impressions. Unless you’re Jurassic Park 9, you don’t actually want to spend money here. There are so many places to spend marketing dollars today with way higher intent. Brand awareness campaigns are squarely in the middle of the barbell.

Top of Mind:

See Brand Awareness.

Chasing Vanity Metrics:

We see this quite a bit and call it out when we do. A blog post from 2019 contributes 30% of total traffic. The problem is, the blog post has nothing to do with the core product or service. New visitors to the site flock to the article. If bouncing from the page without taking any further action was a conversion, that traffic converts 100% of the time.

Things You (or I) Don’t Understand

“Omnichannel Bidtream Intelligence Engine”

“Incrementality-Calibrated Media Mix Modeling.”

“Supply Path Optimization Suite”

If it feels like a foreign language: hang up. Close out. If you’re wondering, the translation is we keep 80% of the marketing dollars you give us. But our reports and conference rooms are going to be glossy AF. Other translations include the middle.

There you have it.

Thanks again to Taleb and his books: Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game. His arguments inspired this method. Though he argues his approach from an investment standpoint, I believe it also applies to marketing and growing your business. It allows for a more antifragile strategy: one that not only withstands shocks and uncertainties but also thrives on them.

Avoid the middle. Embrace the extremes of safety and speculation. Low downside. High upside. Let’s go.

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Affiliate Programs: What to Do and What to Avoid

Part traction channel, part revenue stream, part lead gen tool, affiliate programs can be extremely effective for everyone involved. When done correctly, that is. By definition, affiliate programs are arrangements in which a company pays a commission to affiliates for delivering conversions. Sales and leads are the primary conversions used, but some companies will pay for web traffic.

Amazon, of course, is one of the leaders in the affiliate space. Coined Amazon Associates, the e-commerce behemoth pays percentages and flat fees on sales generated from a company’s website or social media account. Say you review baby products on your blog. You can apply (and hopefully get accepted!) to the program, attach a tracking code to links to the product page you are reviewing and you’re set. In this example generating a sale of a car seat would net you 4.5% of the sale price. A bonus? Commissions don’t just apply to the product you are linking to. Any purchase from a customer you drive there counts!

Keeping with the baby theme, recommend your readers signup for the Amazon Baby Registry and you get $3 as soon as someone adds one item to the list.

Do Your Research

Just like anything on the web, some services are better than others. And when it comes to affiliate programs there are a lot of shady operations. Does it seem too good to be true? Well, it’s probably not. Look out for clumsily put together websites, a lack of terms and conditions and an unorganized fee and payout explanation. You should never pay to join. Anything that says “Get Rich Quick” should be avoided. And make sure the products you would be recommending are legit. The last thing you want is to get scammed out of commission AND your readers or followers scammed as well.

Bottom Line: Do your research, read reviews and talk to associates.

Staying True to Your Brand

It’s important to keep in mind that while you’re driving revenue and making a living that you are still a trusted source of information for your readers. So you certainly don’t want to be mentioning products you don’t recommend just because they have a high price tag. Further to that point, the best affiliates are transparent, noting on their site or in the article they are making a commission over referral purchases. The New York Times does a great job at that when they publish their books bestseller lists.

Why Should I Engage in Affiliate Marketing as a Big Brand

Because it’s noisy out there and you can use all the help you can get! Similar to business development it’s a relationship that is a win for you and a win for the partner. You can almost consider an affiliate network your own paid street team. You just don’t have to pay them until there is money in your pocket.

In terms of who, let’s extend the street team analogy. Who better to market your product than your loyal customers? They are already educated on your brand or service and the promise of occasional discounts in addition to a commission could be a powerful motivator. You’ll, of course, need to vet them and make sure they have a platform worth your effort, but the impact of a team of influencers could be huge.

One place to start would be with your analytics. Who has purchased the most from your store or who opens the most amount of your emails? Is there someone who is always liking, sharing and commenting on social media? Isolating these super users and then vetting them prior to reaching out can save a lot of time.

Looking for some simple tips on setting up your affiliate marketing program? Check out this tutorial!

Want to learn more about affiliate marketing and the other 18 traction channels? Check out our YouTube channel and our podcast, Cutting Through The Noise.

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Qualifying Leads: How to Gather Leads that Convert

Welcome aboard life saver hanging on a palm tree on the beach.

Generating sales leads is getting easier. With so many marketing platforms catering to this objective, it’s satisfying for marketers to watch the leads roll in. From there, leads are given to the sales team to establish contact, evaluate the needs and how the business can meet them, negotiate and hopefully seal the deal. In a perfect world, sales would close every lead that came through the marketing pipeline. However, this is often not the case. Often more frustrating is spending time working with information of an unqualified lead, resulting in no sales and a waste of both time and resources on the wrong audience.

So how can marketing help convert those leads to sales? Get smarter about the who, the how, and develop strategies designed to improve the experience for all. Focus on fine-tuning your inbound marketing rather than outbound. Inbound marketing efforts are already improving the quality and volume of leads received by many businesses. In fact, only 18% of marketers in 2018 reported that they gathered high quality leads contributed to outbound efforts.

Whatever your lead generation process is, here are some tips Pintler Group employs to improve the quality of leads.

Research Your Target Audience and Know Where to Reach Them

Okay, so this one isn’t so much a strategy but a reminder to marketers. Know your audience! Sometimes your service or product may call for you to cast a wide net, but be prepared that qualified leads will be lower. Sheer volume of leads isn’t enough to justify ad spend if the leads don’t convert. Research what worked in the past and consider replicating those efforts. What platform did you use? What language was shown in the ad? How many points of contact occurred before the sale closed? These types of questions can help narrow down an audience more likely to convert.

Develop a Shortlist of Questions to Ask

When responding to a lead, you need to have questions ready prior to the interaction. Keep these questions short and simple. Always ask what the lead is hoping to achieve. Ask why the lead showed interest in your business. Nothing is more frustrating than having a long conversation that ends with both parties realizing that neither can help the other. For marketers hoping to automate the process, consider sharing these questions in a survey format. Our next tip can help achieve this.

Set Up an Email Automation

Email marketing is a powerful channel to incorporate into your lead generation efforts. When a user opts into your email subscription, take advantage of this interaction to provide value to the user and encourage lead generation.

For those using lead generation ads, setting up an automated email campaign that fires off when a lead is submitted can really speed up the vetting process. Using a service that connects multiple platforms, such as Zapier, can really eliminate the pressure to reach out in a timely matter.

A simple email automation campaign could consist of 2 emails:

#1: The first email is sent at a time delay of 30 minutes after the lead is sent, thanking the user for their interest and inquiring how the business can meet their needs.

#2: A second email is sent a few days later, encouraging the user to explore the website or provide the user with additional information, such as a downloadable PDF with sales information.

As mentioned previously, you could consider adding to the first email your lead qualifying questions in a survey format. Make your emails as useful to the user as you can. Consider including testimonials in text or video format or a FAQ section as well.

Retarget Audiences

In marketing, timing is everything. Take advantage of the data you have and build data-driven retarget audiences. This information can be gathered from your website, email marketing software or from ads. Develop different paths based on actions taken and target users with lead generation ads. “Actions taken” could refer to any website visitor that has visited more than twice in 30 days, subscribers of your blog that have an open email rate of 50% or higher, or even users who have clicked on your awareness ad. Use this type of targeting to give prospective leads a push in the right direction and establish contact. By retargeting those who have already demonstrated some interest in your business, chances are better than they will turn out to be more qualified.

Discuss the Process with Your Sales Team

We’ve all worked in an environment where communication between departments may not be the best. Make an effort to improve those communications between sales and marketing. Ask the sales team what efforts have led to success for them and share what you have found successful on the marketing end. For marketers and sales teams, only good things can come from working together to improve lead generation efforts.

Learn more about sales and the other 18 traction channels in our podcast, Cutting Through The Noise on Spotify, Apple Podcast or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Watch this video to learn more about the psychology of sales.

business development email email automation lead generation sales traction channels

Business Development: Finding the Right Partner

The phrase “business development” can be intimidating. After all, it sounds like something only big corporations dabble in. Thoughts of power lunches in power suits come to mind. But just because you don’t have an arsenal of sales executives and vice presidents doesn’t mean you can’t develop your business in a rewarding way. That is, after all, the definition!

Know Your Goal

Let’s use the example of a fictional clothing company named Threaded. They sell online and have a storefront in their Texas town. In recent years Threaded has experienced the same pain point as other retailers: a drop in foot traffic. Digital marketing efforts keep the e-commerce business on fire but have yet to get people in the store.

The owners task their marketing agency with increasing store visits followed by setting a revenue growth goal. There are multiple traction channels in play: unconventional PR, outside advertising and viral marketing. But they decided on seeking local partnerships. Enter the business development traction channel. And a few baseball teams.

A Standard Partnership

This form of business development is as simple as it sounds. In practice, two entities work together to reach an established goal. Ideally, the partnership is to the benefit of both parties. The important piece is that each partner brings something to the table the other can’t execute on by themselves.

Athletic wear, including shirts and jerseys, compromises a huge piece of the Threaded bottom line. They also believe in community first business. Combining these two things leads them to a partnership with the town’s Little League.

Threaded designs and produces shirts for each of the six teams. Each has different graphics and colors, but the consistent piece is the prominent Threaded logo. The unique value each partner brings to the table? The Little League gets free shirts they badly need and Threaded gets brand awareness on the backs of a hundred kids and coaches. They also get billboards in the various parks.

Is That Really Developing Business?

Of course! A common outcome of strategic business development is brand awareness. While this is a byproduct of traction channels like advertising, this is organic. And aside from production costs, free. Every time those Little Leaguers take the field parents and friends see the Threaded logo. Pizza parties after the games? Same. It’s the repetition that leads a person on main street pop into the store when they recognize the logo.

As we often talk about successful execution in one traction channel can lead to success in other channels. In this case, there are two examples. Specifically, since Threaded is giving the shirts to the league for free they are getting good press. From mentions in the newspaper to general word of mouth, they are benefiting from the traction channel PR. Without any additional effort! Additionally, images of the kids wearing the shirts start popping up on Instagram and Facebook, both from the players and parents. All of a sudden people not at the game are seeing the branding.

When pursuing a standard partnership as your way of developing business both sides must win. In this case, success.

Licensed to Sell

Threaded is in a unique position that it has multiple avenues to execute strategic business development. This second example is equally as effective and somewhat the opposite of the Little League venture.

Sticking with their athletic wear trend, Threaded decides to license the name and art rights for Texas A&M. In this case, you have one company – a university – who has a recognizable brand but wants it seen wider. You have another company – threaded – who designs amazing products but needs a recognizable brand to attract eyeballs. And thus sales.

Both the school and Threaded get free advertising out of this partnership. People are advertising the school just by wearing the shirts and hats. Threaded starts becoming the college’s “brand” and it’s hard to go to a football stadium or music festival without being flooded with their products.

Winners all around again!

If you’d like to learn more about the business development traction, specifically how to validate efforts through data, check out this video. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel for additional videos and listen to our podcast for even more content!

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