OneLeg Up: Serious vs Curious

Edward Davis 

Welcome to OneLegUp, where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience and how you can achieve zero marketing waste. I’m Ed Davis, the Chief Operations Ninja here at OneLeg, and today I’m joined as ever, by our CEO and mastermind Vic Sun. Vic, how are things?

Vic Sun 

Good. We’re super busy. And I’m glad we’re doing this today. It’s been a while been it’s been a while since we did one.

Edward Davis 

It has been a while. But there were the holidays, there was this, there was that. But we’re back, we’re better than ever, we’ve got a whole slate of really good episodes coming up, that we’re going to be working on getting recorded and distributed. So really excited about the way we’ve starting off the year with a really interesting topic, one that comes up on a fairly regular basis, and one that just about everybody in every sales position deals with or sales and marketing position deals with, no matter the industry that you’re in, there’s some version of this. And that is really and it’s sort of a phrase that that Vic is coined a little bit. You hear about it in other realms. Tire kickers, we think of it in terms of are you a serious buyer? Are you a curious buyer? And so, where I’d like to start, Vic, is where does that come from? And what do we exactly do we mean, when we talk about serious versus curious?

Vic Sun 

I think it’s, it’s really it really starts from the user’s journey in their intent. And, a lot of the times, you know, marketing agencies and departments, they don’t really even know, right, the difference between the two. And so a lot of the times whether you’re generating leads, or you’re trying to generate revenue, you know, you’re looking at your prospects the same way. And the reality is, the overwhelming majority of prospects are curious. They’re not serious, right? If they’re serious, then they’d be contacting you, they’d be, you know, they’d be driving, you know-

Edward Davis 

You wouldn’t have to be marketing to them as essentially what we’re saying.

Vic Sun 

Yeah, and my contention is, you wouldn’t have to sell them. 

Edward Davis 

Right.

Vic Sun 

Right, you really don’t have to do the whole sales pitch and, and then the song and dance and these promotions, because, serious buyers have certain values that they already have, in mind, and there’s, certain things that you can do to align to those things, but for the most part, you know, when you’re serious about doing something, you know, making a purchase, or, or facilitating a transaction, I think your motivation is very different from one where you’re gonna just browsing around if you’re just curious, you know?

Edward Davis 

Sure, no, 100%. And I think the other thing, too, is, I was thinking about this, as we were prepping for this, I think the internet has actually made it worse, right. And digital marketing has actually made curious, worse, in some very specific ways. It’s better in some and from a customer standpoint, right? Because you don’t have to necessarily drive around to a bunch of brick and mortar stores or anything like that just to, you know, poke and prod and see, and all that kind of stuff.

I think it also, it allows companies to be a bit more efficient in their physical assets that they might have to have. But on the flip side of that, marketers and companies in general, you know, spend a significant amount of time and resources on curious buyers, because we do have to be conscious of those people, right? Because the mindset has to be, well, at some point they might turn into serious buyers, and or can we do anything to instigate them going from curious to serious along a predefined path that we have, that we think would be beneficial, both to the customer and to ourselves? But like I said, I think if you look at it, by and large, there’s a lot of time and effort spent on identifying curious people to try and get them into sort of serious mode, you know, what I mean?

Vic Sun 

I think most companies that do not have compelling content, that do not have the ability to harness the data, or even study it and analyze it in order to be able to really drill down to their target audiences, right are those particular funnels. They are really more concerned about curious, right, that’s all they know. That’s all they want. Quantity is important and so they live in that right feels good. You know, because when you when you get a lot of inquiries, you get a lot of leads, you get a lot of clicks, it feels good. It feels like you’re actually doing something-

Edward Davis 

Making some progress. Yeah.

Vic Sun 

Even with salespeople, you know, like whether you’re an ABM, right, and then you and you’re hitting up several different leads or opportunities in your pipeline, or you’re doing in home presentations. And the standard is, you’ve got to have at least 10 to 12 of these each week. Lot of waste, right? Because really, what you’re doing is you’re doing it by the numbers, and you’re saying, well, I’m going to go and have 10 to 12 of these curious people. And, I already know that only about 10 I think maximum 30% of them, right? the rest of them really will not amount to anything. Right. You, you’re just you’re going through the motions. And I think one of the compelling points you made there, and I have a question to ask you is really how does the marketing strategy and the tactics and the lack of content, perpetuate, you know, the this the lead generation, and just curious, you know, what I mean, because lead generation companies out there like HomeAdvisor, AMG Modernise, you know, several of these companies that just sell leads, there is really no relevant content right. They’re basically looking at keywords. They’re looking at inquiries generating lead forms, and then they sell this to several people. That’s what a lead aggregator does, right. And so how does the lack of content and the lack of targeting and the lack of personalization perpetuate that in your opinion?

Edward Davis 

Well, I think it really gets into what your stance and what your approach is, just in general, right. And, and a lot of that gets into brand personality, the culture of your organization, right. And so if you, if you’re an organization that all we want to do is generate leads so that we can push those leads into our sales team, and they can close at the 15%, or 10%, or whatever the case may be, so that we can then generate the revenue, the predictable revenue that we can, based on this formula, which we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, and we’ve talked about and webinars and all that kind of stuff, then yeah, you don’t actually need a lot of content, you don’t need to actually think through what that actual customer journey is, other than I need to have a wide net to attract somebody, and then I’m going to force onto them what it is that I want to sell. Right.

And I think we are very fortunate to have a number of clients who take the opposite, right? And they are interested in what is the content? What are the decision triggers that are along the way? And can we actually build a relationship with somebody who might not necessarily be in the market right now. But we want to occupy a space in their mind in the future. Right. And I think those are really interesting companies, especially from a home improvement standpoint, because that is a radical way of thinking about business development and sales in a home improvement context. And, so from my standpoint, if you look at it from what I’ve historically done on a b2b side, or a b2b marketing standpoint, or really, even from a b2c, this is really where this started, you have to create brand affinity, right with your target audience. And creating brand affinity doesn’t mean that right in this very specific moment, I need to put a coke in your hand, or I need to put the keys of this new Volvo in your hand, that’s really not what this is about. It’s really about creating visibility and creating sort of these moments of interaction where you might just get a little piece of what the value proposition is for that new Volvo. Right? You might not be in the in the mood to buy a new car in the market for a new car, but you will be in a year or two or three. And they’re making a significant investment to, like I said, occupy that little bit of space in your mind. And we’ve talked about it before, you know, a friend of mine, in the UK is big on talking about, if you’re one of the first three brands that immediately come to mind 90% of the time you’re going to win. And so you know we’ve adopted that a little bit here at OneLeg and we put our own spin on it. But so yeah, you know, from my standpoint, those are the those are the types of companies that I think over the long haul actually went out because the world is dramatically changing in terms of how customers want to interact with companies and how they want their data and their information to be handled and what happens when I actually give you my information. I think that brings us nicely around to you Some of the ways in which we talk about how do we handle, you know, identifying the curious people versus the serious people. And you know, are there some telltale signs, whether it’s sort of digital body language or actual physical body language that we can think about?

Vic Sun 

Yeah, I think you’ve got to look at multiple elements, which is really the thing that a lot of companies are not equipped to do. And something another agency owner once told me the reason that brand and brand affinity and data and analytics, you know, is because in home improvement, for example, you know, for big purchases, people are only doing it every once every 10 years. Like, right, why the hell do you need to do brand and all that stuff? And I thought to myself, what a stupid thing to say, you know, because it’s like, the reality is, the people are never ready to do these things. The minute that you start going to market, whether you’re sending them promotions every week, or every month, or mailers or those sort of things that are pretty common within certain industries, right. And so the overwhelming majority, the blue ocean of your opportunity, are people who are in fact, curious, they’re not serious, right. And so if your strategy is always to hit on the curious people with promotions, and those sort of things, thinking that they’re serious, right away, you’ve got a targeting issue, you’ve got a strategy issue, and the results that you’re getting, or what you’re getting now, right? I think what’s interesting is, you know, you’ve really got to look at it from multiple elements, you know, you got to look at within your own database, you’ve got to study that you’ve got to take a look at the people who’ve purchased who have not purchased, you know, their age range or demographics, credit scores, all of this stuff is literally free, right? If you try to mark it down to, to, well, how do I pick these points are, but it’s just effort, right? And sometimes it is bandwidth, most of the time it is bandwidth, you don’t have enough churn of people in your, in your team who know how to do this,

Edward Davis 

Or training. Yeah, yeah bandwidth and training

Vic Sun 

By bandwidth and training. The other thing is, if you’re going to go to market, then yeah, it’s really studying the marketplace, your competitors, you know, picking up these data points. And, and really, once you have all of those, it’s now doing a lot of testing, right? And seeing Okay, well, this is the content. And then building on that, you know, when people talk about will the intent side of things, right, you’ve got the low buying intent, curious leads, or prospects. Typically, it’s because you created that right, that’s by design, right? You’ve come up with, let’s say, a landing page as a promotion, and then a lead form of some sort. And really, that’s what it is, and you’ve done nothing else other than that, then what you may be, what you are producing is a low buying intent, lead a curious person, right? Curious buyer or persona. Whereas, you know, a serious one, I think this is where the struggle happens with many companies is, you’re not going to get that person signing up right away, what you have maybe at the most positive indicating is maybe somebody who’s not going to follow you, somebody who’s going to subscribe to your newsletter, right? Follow your page, or your your YouTube channel or follow you on social media. And the reason that they’re doing that is because they’re not ready, so you’re not going to get that lead right away. However, as you build the content, as they consume it, you know, they start getting primed, they start feeling like you’re the company, then once they start providing you their information or connecting with you, that becomes a higher buying intent, lead. So not only is the curious and serious, you know, concept, a major, I think, an issue, right within many industries. But it’s also this concept that we you can’t have your cake and eat it too, if you are really going to focus on serious, right, which in studies have shown companies have proven it day in and day out that have done it, that that is where the growth happens. This is where the revenue takes place, that’s where it’s most profitable, you’re going to get less, less quantity of leads, right? Or prospects, because let’s face it in the beginning, you’re making, you’re making a stand, look, I want to be able to cater to the people who will be serious buyers, right and get rid of the waste. Now, I said in the beginning, because what you see is a rise in that quantity over a period of time, right? Because you’re gone and this is actually the simplest way to explain this is to really just relate it to if you if you think about influencers in the beginning when influencers you know, they start off with very little followers, they build a lot of content. But as they start growing their amount of content and the type of audiences the serious people who want to follow them. The rise is exponential. And this is why you start seeing them going from very, very slow up to 10,000. And then they hit, you know, 20, you know, and then it’s slow to 30. But once they start getting to the 50, it becomes 100. And then very 500, it’s so exponential, right? Because they’ve invested in the content that, you know, that’s driven this series people to their, to their sites.

Well, I look at it, I look at it as your serious buyers are the ones who are going to impact your revenue today, right. And your curious ones are the ones who are going to impact it next year, five years from now. So you and you have to have a little bit of a not balanced approach, but you have to have an approach to account for, for both of those types of people. Because I agree.

Edward Davis 

Well, more specifically along a spectrum, right? Because if you the best example that I can give is, you know, one time my wife and I was shopping for cars. And we were not interested in I won’t say the manufacturer. But we ended up buying a Volvo. And it’s another Swedish carmaker. And we just happen, you know that their dealership was right next door to the Volvo dealership. And we just happen to wander over there just to see. And when we when we got over there. I’m not kidding you, within two minutes, within two minutes of walking down the line yet, you know, you got to walk through the cars to before we get to the showroom, like some guy was already walking over to us and how you folks doing today, you’re in the mood for buying a car, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, our answer was, well, we’re just sort of out taking a look, it’s a nice day out. And he essentially looked at us for about two seconds, and then went, Okay, no problem. And turned around. Right? It wasn’t any further conversation. He didn’t try to further qualify. You know, is there anything that I can do or anything like that? It was, it was just he made a snap assessment? Oh, well, I’m not going to be able to sell them today. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. Because within a couple hours, we were back over at Volvo, buying a brand new car. You know what I mean? And so I think I think salespeople in particular. And again, I’m not I’m not trying to bag on salespeople, for sure. I think at times, they get a little bit ahead of themselves, and they’re more interested in? Am I going to be able to sell this person today? Does that have an impact on my, I might not be here in a year from now. So what the hell do I care about whether or not we’re trying to build a relationship with them-

Vic Sun 

Because they’re trained that way? Right?

Edward Davis 

Agree, yeah, no understood.

Vic Sun 

You’re so used to low, low intent, low quality, low closing prospects, that your training is geared towards, you know, they’re going to be serious, as long as you present this particular presentation or pitch, when that’s not really the overwhelming majority of the audience. And so there’s really this disconnect between marketing and sales, where you’ve got a marketing qualified lead and MQL versus a sales qualified lead or an SQL. And, and in most cases, I would say, nine out of 10 times in a lot of companies, those two things are not, you know, they’re not synonymous with one another are exactly very different. And so what you get is, you know, again, this disconnect, but what I know that, that what I know, is from my experience with, with salespeople, either training them, you know, working with them is that they’re, they always have, you know, this affinity for those sales that they make, when the client says to them, you know, I’ve been seeing you, you know, on these ads, or, you know, you know, you’ve seen those really cool things that you guys do and the videos that you produced. And that becomes really the topic of the conversations, I’m aligning, you know, the consumers aligning themselves with the values of the company,  as opposed to just trying to negotiate between the company all its other competitors look the same.

Edward Davis 

Right.

Vic Sun 

 Right, which, which, really, that that becomes where That’s where most companies live, that’s where the low close rates are. Whereas if the conversation is Yeah, I really like the content that you guys produce, sounds like this is what you guys are doing. And I you know, it’s, it’s no longer you know, this selling thing is happening. It’s more like your order taking almost, right? Which, you know, I’ve always argued that with, with our approach versus I think, a lot of companies, you know, regardless of what sales agencies or organizations or training companies say, Oh, you need to sell for me, it’s like, there is no one salesperson in this world that will complain about taking an order and say, oh, man my dignity and my skills weren’t recognized because I took an order like salespeople, you know, will take an order, you know, just as fast as they as they would sell. So, you know, I think that’s just the difference there. Why do you think people are? So I mean, you talked about the spectrum of having strategies, where you hit the serious in the curious, obviously, you want to have that balance. Right. But what is the what is the thing that stops a lot of companies from from taking that strategy? And just, you know, we’re gonna keep doing what we’re doing.

Edward Davis 

I think a lot of it is impatience, right, I think we have been trained as consumers. You know, we want instant gratification and in virtually every part of our lives by and large, right, and that that manifests itself in, in most businesses as what are we doing to generate a sale today, right now, blah, blah, blah, there really is no visibility, there really isn’t not a ton of concern about what are we doing to build a revenue base or an engaged audience a year from now or two years from now? And I think, you know, some of the some of the points that underlie that is, look at the average tenure of marketing people or heads of sales, or CEOs. It used to be I think, what 20 years ago, the average tenure of a CMO was something in the neighborhood of four or five, six years, somewhere around there. Now it’s banging on two years. I think it made him even dipped lower than than 24 months at this point.

Vic Sun 

In some industries, though, I would argue like in Home Improvement remodeling, I think it’s the reverse, but it’s that’s their crutch, because usually, you’ve got people who’s just gonna here who are basically still marketing late, late 2011,

Edward Davis 

Correct?

Vic Sun 

You Know?

Edward Davis 

Right. And I was just gonna come on to that, you know, there are some industries where they are, they’re antithetical to what what else is happening in the world and in home improvement, in particular, as you and I have seen, there’s this trend to, and again, I’m the last person to bang on, you know, inexperienced, older crowd, or, you know, an inexperienced younger crowd. But that’s really where you’re at in home improvement. In terms, if you actually have a home improvement company that has any sort of scale, that isn’t just a couple, a couple people, you know, trying to start a business or something along those lines, more than likely, they have an older person who oversees marketing, they’re doing a lot of the same things that they were doing 5, 6, 10 years ago, or they brought in somebody who is two years out of college who happens to understand social media or something along those lines. And by understand social media, I’d absolutely use air quotes. And we put those people in charge of marketing. And because we feel like they’re a little bit easier to manage, and they’re not going to necessarily question, you know, the longer term play married with the short term play married with brand development, married with sales develop-, like they just have no concept of that it really is just a matter of ticking a box and doing what it is that’s been done forever in a day.

Vic Sun 

Yeah, and I think that’s, that’s, that’s also one of the crutches is, you know, there’s a lot of this these issues, and it’s, it’s, it’s like almost so difficult to find a way to make a change, because it’s either everybody else is doing the same thing. And you’re so afraid that if you do something different, you know, you’re going to fail, and then we’re ones that do, you know, and we’ve had this experience with one or two clients where that impatience, it’s like, holy shit, like you just like you just made the switch to this to this program, after like, 20 years of doing the same thing. And then, you know, they’re disappointed that in six months, they didn’t double their business.

Edward Davis 

They’re disappointed in 60 days, they didn’t double their business.

Vic Sun 

Right. Yeah. Well-

Edward Davis 

You know what I mean?

Vic Sun 

but it but but then, but then you go, aren’t you hiring, you know, for the long term, but I think it’s, it’s that balance. And I think, you know, owners need to develop, you know, this, this, this commitment to? Well, look, I know that this is the right thing to do. And I would like to see improvements rather than just results. Right? Because when you’re so geared towards that, I think this is the problem with a lot of companies, whether home improvement, real estate, you know, ecommerce, you know, we’ve got clients like that too, in that space where they want that three-month turnaround from their investment. And then you look at everything else that they’re doing like that that’s been successful. It’s been like, it’s only it was only successful after the second or third key here. To them. It’s like, Oh, my God, like get it’s been three months. How come it hasn’t been it hasn’t worked. So-

Edward Davis 

Well, but I think there’s another dynamic to that, that we haven’t talked about. But it does come up in certain industries. And certainly it comes up in home improvement. Which is, and you’ll know this, Vic, because you’ve heard me say it before to clients. What are we trying to build here from a business standpoint? Are we trying to build a legacy business that stands the test of time that can get handed down from one generation to the next, quite literally one generation to the next? Or are we building a lifestyle business to keep the ownership, you know, in a nice car, nice house, and with the country club membership? If that’s where you’re at, more than likely, you are absolutely focused on lead gen, and what is it that I can do to generate maximum number of sales today, this week, this month, this quarter, if you fall into, I’m building a legacy, and I have a much longer term view, and I ultimately don’t, I want this to be something that outlives me, Ed Davis, like, you know, you think about it from a One L eg standpoint, you and I are both agreed, you know it in the immediate, you know, this is really about a lifestyle to give a group of people who, you know, are trying to build a business, you know, the foundation of a nice life and a nice working environment. But we’re also agreed, that we want One Leg to survive, you and I one way or the other, right? And so you take a different view, and you make different decisions, and you put you put the decision making process through a different prism. And I think what comes along with that is the sales and marketing side. And so, you know, it’s a multi-faceted, sort of challenge, if you will. But I think at the end of the day, you really have to ask yourself some hard questions, if you’re a business owner, in terms of what is it you’re trying to build? And why?

Vic Sun 

Well, the thing that you mentioned in the beginning is how do you identify, for example, these people? So how do you know that you can actually harness the the serious and the curious and what that virtual or visual cues, right for for people to know that so that they can start to describe their business? I think it starts with their or their audience.

 And the reality is,

Edward Davis 

Sure.

Vic Sun 

With a lot of companies, again, aren’t really looking at some of the most basic things like, for example, we look at, for example, websites that have been built for them that are right off the gate, you know, it’s templates, a templated site, right? That’s, you know, built on Elementor, or some sort of like, you know, you know, template heavy design. And then you go and say, well, there’s nothing wrong with that fine. But then you go and say, well, the minute that person steps in there, what do they see? What do you tell them? And the first thing you see are a two or three call to actions that are pretty much the same thing. There’s lead form, right, give me your info, and in and then when you ask the business owners like you would, what’s the plan here? And they were like, well, I just want more? Well, more of what more of people who fill out something or don’t fill out something? Because the majority of the people who visit your site, for example, leave? Right? So you just want more of that? Or do you want more of the people who fill out that don’t convert? Right? And to them it’s like, well, I just want more quantity of, of names and numbers, right, so I can contact them. So I think it’s not just like, if we were to go and say, look, and we do for our clients, we say these are your target audiences, this is their behavior, this is what they’re doing on your site. This is the heat map of their journey, when they their behavior we plugged, we plugged that into their sites, landing pages and such.

Edward Davis 

Right, but even taking that a step further. And we’re starting to do this with some of our clients. Let’s be a little bit more pragmatic than that. And let’s be let’s segment our audience. Right from the get go. Right? So when when our audience comes to our website, let’s just ask them a very simple question. And this isn’t the exact question you would ask, but just for the sake of this conversation, I’m trying to make it as easy to follow along as possible. Are you ready to buy? Or are you not ready to buy, if you’re ready to buy, you’ve got one experience on our website that ultimately is going to lead you into a position where you get an estimate you get to communicate with with the company, on your terms, all that kind of stuff. If you’re not ready to buy, then we’re gonna go, we’re gonna push you into a content funnel that helps you understand when you might, you know, what are the triggers, I need to recognize within myself that says, oh, yeah, I am ready for this service, or I am ready for this product. Right? And so it’s more of an educational sort of dialogue. And let’s just get it right out there at the front. Let’s divide the audience so that we can then focus our efforts on both right we can we can absolutely nurture those leads who want something now, and we can also nurture those contacts who, you know, they might be ready in a year they might be ready in six months.

Vic Sun 

Sorry. It’s so funny. You mentioned that because we did that for one of our clients and their numbers rose by 300%.

Edward Davis 

Correct.

Vic Sun 

We said, numbers sales as opposed to leads. Right? Right, you know, the leads have maintained the same, but the conversion has like grown in strides. And I think it’s funny because he was mentioning he was a hatch user. And we’ve done stuff with Hatch, podcasts and stuff like that. And we’ve started to see a lot of Hatch users. But he was like, Well, I don’t get it. Because when when, when people were getting here, I was giving them content. And I said, What is content? And we looked at it, everybody was getting the same 17 messages, right? It was templated, right from within the out of the box. And then it kind of goes into funnel hatch is able to do that out of the box. Just like templates, they can they’ve built for you. And I said, Well, if everybody’s getting the same content, and everybody’s getting the same verbiage, how are you really personalizing and targeting those people who are serious, right, or or who are curious, because there’s no discrepancy. There’s no differentiation. And I think that’s the challenge, right is there has to be work involved in person, because once you know the information of, well, here’s my two target audiences, they’re curious and serious. And this is what they look like, the messaging and the content will be different for both of them.

Edward Davis 

Yeah.

Vic Sun 

Right, and you have to, and you have to test them, you have to absolutely do A B tests. And that takes time. But it also provides you with even better targeting, once you complete those testing

Edward Davis 

Correct.

Vic Sun 

Which usually only takes 30 to 60 days, right? You know, at the minimum. And I think that is one thing, I would kind of motivate a lot of owners out there who are kind of scared to death about doing these tests and kind of saying, hmm, you want me to go and have the person their users, right from the get go reveal who they are. Is this, you know, whatever you’re doing now, just ask yourself this question: If I don’t make a change, will it improve over time? And if the answer is yes, fine, and keep doing what you’re doing. But if whatever you’re doing now, has in not doing anything is not going to improve over a period of time, then you’ve got really nothing to lose, right? Your testing this and putting it together. It’s like it’s all the gains. And I would say this, you know, an owner told me once he said, and he was smart enough to recognize this. He said, I realized after the pandemic, I had to restart my business, like it was 26 years ago. I had to really think about it and say, Well, when I first started my business, I had to invest I had to risk because I didn’t know and after the pandemic, you know, the pendulum has shifted and he saw that there is no events and he was event heavy. He was canvasser heavy. And so he said, Well, I needed to do something that was different. The first six months obviously were terrible. But then he focused on improvement and he just kept at it. But I think that was the mindset it was like I need to invest into my company. And if I haven’t been doing it for a very very long time, I expect that I’m not going to do it so well right from the get go but it will improve over time.

Edward Davis 

Yeah. Well, we’re gonna park it right there, and that’s it for us today. We hope you’ve enjoyed our chat and learned a couple things. As always, we here at OneLeg believe poor marketing pollutes the planet, and that business is full of tired, outdated, indistinct, unremarkable and underperforming marketing that sucks. But what sucks even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing of all: the customer. We’re on a mission on behalf of our client’s customers to change that.

To learn more, go to zeromarketingwaste.com where you can subscribe to our blog and this very podcast. You can also find us and follow us by looking for the flamingo and the OneLeg handle wherever you socialize online. That’s it for us. Talk to you next time.