 It was about nine o'clock at night, and the phone rang, and it was for my dad. My dad got on the phone and listened for about four minutes, hung up the phone, grabbed the keys and took off without saying a word. We were sitting at the dinner table, having had dinner and now eating some dessert and taking it easy, and we were just going, what happened? The car took off and we didn't hear from him for another day, day and a half. My dad worked at an aerospace engineering firm where they built satellites, low earth orbiting or Leo satellites. Those are the ones that are pretty close to the earth, and they're involved with things like your cellular service or your TV cable TV. Whenever they're doing satellite work, and it's not just here in the US, but across the globe, these are the satellites that he was involved with, and so to get an emergency middle of the night call, like, oh my God, he has to take off, like, what happened? I'd like to tell you what happened. They had decided for a satellite phone company to launch one of these satellites up that would provide coverage for cellular signal in a country much like Brazil. I can't tell you explicitly if it was Brazil, but for the purposes of this discussion, let's just assume it was Brazil. And since you're going to actually run cellular service and sell satellite phones in Brazil, what do you do? Well, you buy billboard space, right, and you set up little retail shops and you create flyers and you pay some guy to stand outside a retail door holding a sign and shaking it all to prep an entire market for new satellite signal and new satellite phone coverage in Brazil. If you go to many different countries, you discover that they don't have the infrastructure of the wires that had been deployed in the 70s, 60s, and 70s, and so it made sense to do it with satellites, and so they spent tons of money and time, the satellite phone company, prepping that market. The day before my dad got that phone call, they had launched, and you can imagine, right, you have the big billboards that say, right, now you can get on satellite phone on this day. Everything's prepped for the launch, and when the launch happened, there was no signal at all. At the same time, one of the satellite phone company execs was on holiday in a country kind of like Mexico. I can't tell you exactly if it was Mexico, but for the purposes of this discussion, we'll just call it Mexico. And he had the satellite phone with him, but he knew there was no coverage in Mexico, so it's not a big deal, until launch day when his phone started beeping. So he called the home office and said, hey, when did we get signal in Mexico? And the company's like, we don't have signal in Mexico. He's like, I'm calling you from the phone in Mexico. It's clear we have signal in Mexico. So he got in a car and drove all around, just to find out, okay, is it an anomaly? Like right here in this town? No, everywhere he drove. They had signal. They had full coverage. I said, what the hell is going on? I'm going to give you a tip if you've ever built a satellite. It turns out, these big guys, they have big panels on the side. Those panels are what reflect and send signal back down to the earth. And it turns out that if you make a mistake, like say, putting them in the wrong spots, you just kind of confuse your left and your right. You cover Mexico instead of Brazil. So what'd they do? They rushed into Mexico. They bought billboards. They set up retail signs. They hired a guy with a sign and they started selling like mad in Mexico. And then they had to change the billboards in Brazil to say, hey, we're about three months out. You didn't invite me here to tell you about satellites. I know that. And most of you may not know who I am, and that's okay. I've spent a lot of time over the last five years working with commercial WordPress companies as an advisor, as a coach, as a helper, as just a friend. And in many of those cases, I've worked with many of the companies you know. And they're all fantastic at writing code. Maybe one of these guys are fantastic at writing code. Turns out when it comes to marketing, though, at different points in their stage of business, they've discovered, wow, this sales and marketing thing isn't necessarily our strength. And I've had the opportunity to get to spend time with some of them and work through some issues. And so today I want to talk to you, not just about satellites, but I want to talk to you about why we suck at marketing and sales and what we can do about it. And the first thing that we can learn from our satellite story is that we need to plan. We need to invest in a marketing plan in exactly the same way that you invest in a development plan. And here's the thing. Not a single company I know is surprised by the development work they do on a plug-in or a theme or some other commercial work. They know that for months they've assigned developers. If you ask the guys at Ninja Forms right now, okay, you got version three coming out. When's it coming out? They may not be able to tell you the date it's coming out. But if you ask them, do you have any people working on this thing, they're like, of course we do. They know exactly who's working on it. They know exactly what they're doing. Development does not surprise the company. And yet, more often than not, not in the case of Ninja Forms, but more often than not, commercial product companies in the WordPress ecosystem show up to market like our satellite phone company. Like a surprise like, oh my God, we're suddenly in this market. Now what the hell do we do? It's like we spent all the time writing code and none of the time thinking about marketing. Raise your hand if that speaks to you at all. The rest of you are liars. It's okay. I use Ninja Forms on purpose because they're doing something really remarkable right now. They're not just working on version three. And as much as they tell you that version three is going to be completely different, let me explain to you one thing. It's still a form builder. But like it's not going to make you toast or coffee. It's still a form. So fundamentally, as much as they're going to make it really awesome, what do you really have to do if you're building a form plugin? You have to do more than just build a form plugin. You're going to have to invite an audience, build an audience and engage them so they decide that your plugin is the one that they want to use. And that means you need to think about marketing. And so what these guys have done, right, they've created a content strategy. They've created a content calendar. They spent 20 days in the beginning of the year just prepping people, letting them know, check out this feature, check out this benefit, check out this feature, check out this walkthrough, check out this video. What are they doing? They're inviting people to get excited about the new product. So now what happens? Well, if you walk up to the Ninja Forms display here in the hall, you know what you hear? You hear everybody asking the same question. Hey, when's it coming out? Isn't that much better than if people walk up and say, hey, what's this all about? And that's what most of us do. We launch a product and then people are like, hey, what is this? You don't want people asking what is this? You want people asking, when does it come out and how much can I pay you or where do I give you my card? Right? You want them prepped and ready. The value proposition should be clear. By the time you launch, people should already be ready to say, yes, I already heard about it. I already, I want it. I want it now. You don't want your marketing to be kind of a surprise hiccup like, oh gosh. You know, we just, we put it up there. I used to use a reference here to feel the dreams and then it turns out I spend a lot of time talking to people who've never seen the movie because they're too young. It's like quoting spies like us to the wrong crowd and you're like, what's wrong with you? Right? So I would just say if you build it, they will not necessarily come. There is no magic to this. You need to build an audience and you do that at least one of the most effective ways is to build out a content strategy. Does that make sense? That's the interactive part. And if you're going to build a content strategy, then you need to learn how to tell a story. How many of you have ever heard of Star Wars by a show of hands? I'm a little concerned by that row right up there that just seems like, Manib, were you just looking at your phone or do you really not know what Star Wars is? Yeah. See, oh, there the hand goes up, right? It's a story that when we get to the second chapter of the story, there's a little green guy. He's Yoda. Yoda knows a lot. If you watch enough movies, you discover Yoda's been alive for almost ever. And then there's a young kid named Luke. And Luke has to go off to this planet to meet Yoda, who he doesn't know who Yoda is. He has to meet Yoda for his training. What I want to tell you this morning, you need to be a lot more like Yoda and a lot less like Luke. And let me explain to you what I mean by that. Yoda is not the hero of the story. Yoda is the coach. Yoda is the advisor. Yoda is the one who comes alongside to help Luke out. Who's the hero of the story? Luke. Yet here's the problem. If most of our websites and most of our marketing efforts, we literally get on the webpage and we're like, we're the very best plug-in that there's ever been at doing whatever it is we do. We're the leading plug-in or we're the leading commercial theme that does what we do. We have amazing features to what we do. And you know what you're doing the whole time? You're talking about yourself. And you know what happens when you're talking all about yourself? You make the audience think that you're the hero of the story. And you're not the hero of the story. Your customer is the hero of the story. And you need to be the advisor, the coach, the guide who invites these folks to come alongside you and says, hey, I can help you with this. I have a product. I have a solution that will come alongside and help you with this. But you're the hero of the story. I have a lot of friends who know that in terms of my background, I spent the last 20, 21 years working in software development, coaching and working with and managing software developers and actually know a fair bit of technology. Yet in the WordPress ecosystem, most of the time, I give motivational talks. And when I write up on my blog at chrislema.com, these are story-driven posts. And so I've had more than one technical person approach me and say, you know what you should really do, Chris, write a lot less. That would be helpful because we don't want all these emails, write a lot less. And then just write really deep, long technical articles because people would know how smart you are. My response is, well, my objective is not to help people know how smart I am. My objective is to help someone else in their journey as they move forward. I want to be Yoda, not Luke. Does that make sense? You need to learn to tell a story and the reality is it's not your story you're telling. You're telling the story of your customers, the ones that have already used you, the changes that it's already made on their business. When you do that effectively, other people go, oh, I want to be like them and yes, I want to buy this product if it'll give me those kind of results, which is very different than pounding your chest. We're the very best plug-in that does the very best thing of whatever it does. Somebody says, well, okay, if you want to graduate from what you're doing, don't talk about features, talk about benefits, but the reality is I recommend that you talk about the destination. The destination is when someone buys you, they're trying to go somewhere, they're trying to get somewhere, and if you can help them understand how to get there and how quickly you might be able to get them there, then they're inclined to say, yes, I want this. Help them where they're going, not just features or the benefits of using your product. The folks that do this really well now, a company that you've heard of called WooThemes, just a couple years ago, I was sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco right before WooConf, the first version, and I was sitting there and I happened to sit next to the gal that does content marketing for them, and she said, can I ask you questions about how you do your blog and what we could do to fix our blog and blah, blah, blah. We started talking. I said, yeah, number one, your blog is not your release notes. Your blog is not your software product's release notes. How many of you have gone to a website and clicked on the blog or clicked on the news or whatever they title it, and all you get are articles about this new feature just came out, this new feature came out, hey, get ready for this product is going to launch on this date, this is the new version, and you just keep getting more and more of what is a software release. So she's like, that's not a story. This is not compelling at all. And so if you look at the old days, right, it was like Woo Framework 6, right. Now I'm sure that Woo Framework 6 was awesome, right. I'm positive it was awesome. But the reality is people weren't running their business and waking up in the morning and asking themselves, I wonder about this Woo Framework thing. It just wasn't a question they had. And if you look at the blog today, features every great product page should have. Oh, that's a very different story. Because a business owner says, I need to know what I need to know about this. I don't know if I know everything I need to know. And even if I think I know it, I need to go check it and make sure that it's right. The transformation in just a year and a half or two years of content on Woo Theme's blog is fantastic and amazing and highlights that anybody can do it in a year or so if you put attention to it. You can get off folks. What I call is the difference between outside in and inside out marketing. Inside out marketing is what most of us do. Inside out marketing is I know what we do inside and I'm going to tell the outside world about it. I know what we do. I know our features. I know how we work. I know what's so cool about us. And I'm going to pass it to the outside. And frankly at the end of that you could say something like, and I don't care if they want to know. Outside in marketing starts with a very different proposition. Outside in marketing says, I'm going to ask what my customers need to know. And based on that, to woo them in, I'm going to write that. I start in the outside, not in the inside. I start with, what do my customers need? What's the compelling challenge they're facing and how can I help them accelerate through it? More important than accelerating someone through a problem? Can you even help them anticipate the problem? Because if you can predict what's around the corner for a young business that doesn't know what's around the corner, they will buy all your products forever. I'm not joking, right? If you can predict the problem they're going to have and say, by the way, how old are you as a company? Or what are you facing right now? Or what are your revenues at right now? Or how big is your team right now? I do this a lot because I coach companies. And so once I coach them, I'm like, oh, well, you're probably having this problem. And they look at me like, how did you know? My first answer is often, well, I've put webcams in your office and I just watch you. But if that doesn't get them, then I'm like, no, it's because what you're facing is common at your stage. I can help you get around that corner. And they're like, oh my god, I need that. I need that. And we don't start discussing at that moment my hourly rate because they don't care. How many of you would love it if you were selling a commercial product and people didn't care about the price? Unless you're just too lazy to raise your hand. You're just like, yes, I'm not, yes, that's good. Because the reality is, I would love it if someone came and said, I don't care what it costs, I'm giving you my money. Like, great, that is the relationship I want to have with you. But to do that, you have to anticipate where they're going and help them. And that is outside in marketing. Most of us get caught in this world of monolithic marketing. The notion that every single customer is the same. I don't know if you know this, but you can get a hotel room for like $29 a night. And you can get a hotel room for $500 a night. And both rooms will have four walls, one roof, and a bed. Both rooms will have a bathroom, a toilet, a seat cover, a sink, and a shower. And so maybe you're thinking, well, why the hell would I pay $500 if I can get it for $29? The experience is remarkably different. I'm a fan of the Ritz Carlton. I can afford to be because I'm a little older. I've saved up a few more pennies. The Ritz Carlton is about $450 a night. But you know what's different at the Ritz Carlton? When I visited the very first time, they put a basket of fruit. I was taking my wife for her birthday. They put a basket of fruit in our room. And we only ate the apples and the pears. The rest of it were like, yeah, I don't want that. Seven months later, I went back because I went to a different Ritz Carlton, but I went back because I was doing a meeting very close by. And so I said, I'll just spend the night over there. There was another basket welcoming me back. And do you know what was in the basket? Apples and pears. And that's it. Because their staff take notes and stick it into a database. And when you come back, they process those notes. And you're going, wait, but that's fruity and fancy because you pay $500 a night. Do you know, first of all, do you know what lifetime value is? Does everybody know what lifetime value is? It's the notion that for however long that customer will be a customer, if you take all the revenue that was brought in by that customer, that's the lifetime value. Some companies have a lifetime value of say a year or two. You buy the product, you last a year or two, and then you move on to something else. Other companies have a lifetime value of maybe 20 years. You buy a lot of products over 20 years. That's a lot higher lifetime value. Do you know how much the lifetime value is of a customer at the Ritz Carlton? $250,000. On the first night that I show up and pay $500, they don't know if I'm going to last that long. They don't know if I'm going to give them $250,000. But because on average, that's what customers spend with them, they're going to treat me like I do. And that's a huge difference than the lifetime value of the customers who go to Motel 6. I'm not suggesting that you only sell your products to people who have a lot of money. What I'm suggesting is that you don't sell your products in the same way to both those kinds of people. Does that make sense? They're not the same. So why are you treating them the same? And it's not just about whether they want to spend money or not spend money. They have different problems. And if they have different problems, you should target the problems they have and find the right segment because more than likely the value they're willing to spend per segment differs. I spend a decent amount at a hotel. There are other times when I'm traveling for business that I spend less. There are other times when I'm traveling with my children, I spend even less for them. They get a cheap room and I get the nice room. That's the way that works. I worked two years ago with my friends over at iThemes and we started talking about segmentation. And what we figured out was there are some very distinct people who come to your website. Why don't we name them and let themselves select into the path that they're on? Why don't we just name them? And so what happened is we said, okay, there are bloggers and there are freelancers and there are developers. At the time, we'd only carved out three. They added more recently their gold plan, but three different segments, three different experiences, three different problems, three different dynamics, and then we priced the product and the features to match those segments. And you know what happened? People self-selected in right away. Said, oh, well, I am a freelancer. I probably shouldn't buy the blogger one because I'm not a blogger. I'm gonna buy the freelancer one. Developers like, I'm a developer. I'm not a freelancer. I'm gonna buy the developer one. Fantastic, thank you all. Sometimes just naming the segments and making those available becomes super valuable. There's another company. I didn't work with them at all, but they're fantastic. The guys over at Todaymade created something called Co-Schedule. And one of the cool things they do is right when you get to one of the main pages and you start scrolling down, this little pop-up comes up and it says, tell us about your team. And you get to pick from three options, right? It's just me. There's me and a couple of us. We're a big agency or something like that. And as you click on it, the rest of the page's content changes. The value proposition differs for each different segment. And yet, what most of us do, we work really hard on one offer page, one landing page. We work really hard on one homepage. And we treat everybody the same. It doesn't make sense. Step four, or lesson four, is that we need to stop treating every single person who shows up at our website as if they're perfectly conditioned and ready to make a purchase. On the continuum of negative 10, where someone doesn't even know who you are, they don't know what you do, they don't know the search term to find you. To positive 10, they wear your t-shirt and they walk around all day singing your praises. Most of our websites sell as if they're at negative 0.1. Oh, you're just ready, aren't you? You've waited your whole life for this moment and now that you arrived at my website, I'm gonna give you the button to push so that you can buy my product. And yet, most of us don't live in that world. Most of us are in some part of the process of evaluating these options and what we should pick and whether it's the right one and what version and what features do we need, except we're all in a journey and rarely are we right at that moment where we're like, I'm ready to just buy, just show me the big button so I can click it. This illustration highlights that journey and my lesson to you is, hey, stop acting like it's an always be closing world. You don't need to consistently get ready to close. My friends over in the corner are looking perplexed now because it's the only world they know. They're wrong, the rest of you are smarter than them. You can go home knowing that. You don't need to always be closing. The reality is, some people just need to know what the name is of the problem they're experiencing because what do you search for when you're like, my website doesn't show up on the web anymore. Normally you search for my website doesn't show up on the web anymore. They don't know what SEO is. There are people who don't even know the problem they're in and you have to get the work to educate them to, hey, this is the name of your problem and then this is the name of the class of your solution and then this is the name of my product that's in that space of the solution and then this is why my product is better than everyone else's product and then this is what you need to push the button. It is a journey and if you're only writing one kind of content that'll always be closing content, you're missing out because there's a tons of other people who are coming over and wanna know, okay, what do I need to know next? And you'll see, you can write stories and checklists but you can also write e-books and white papers. You can write case studies and opinions and then you can write the buyer's guide and all of that content becomes valuable. My last tip for you this morning is to listen to your users. Listen to them because the words they use are the words that will help close them. Couple years ago, Reactive Studios came out with a product called Design Palette Pro and I had the privilege of working on the first version of the copy with them and they just kind of assumed, well, Chris just knows this stuff so we'll just ask Chris and he'll just write us a perfect copy but the truth was I didn't know what the perfect copy was, right? So what I do, I start digging into the studio press forms and just mining all the ways that people describe their problem so that you can finally come back and say, okay, here's what I think is gonna work for you, right? Because I'm using your customer's own terms. Does that make sense? Awesome. By the way, read everything by copy hackers. They're fantastic at copy and copy that converts. My name's Chris Summer. I'm the CTO at Crowdfavorite. I also blog over at chrissummer.com and I think we're stepping into questions now. Thank you. Sure, so the question is how do vision statements, particularly as we're talking about the Ritz-Carlton, how do vision statements impact the rest of it or are there other ways to think about things to pay attention to as you're doing segmentation? One of the things I love most about the Ritz-Carlton is not just the vision statement but they have 12 additional values that they work through, things that are core to how they do their business. These are what we call operating norms, right? It dictates that if you're 30 feet away, you need to look up and look at someone down the hallway. You need to make eye contact at 30 feet and at five feet away, you need to actually say hello, right? That's an operating norm. That's very specific. Here's how we treat people. Fundamentally, when we're talking about segments, not every segment needs to be treated the same way, right? Not every, and that's not meaning give bad service to some people. It's just that they don't require the same service. I've walked through tons of Marriots and their staff will walk right by me, right? And you're like, okay, I'm staying at a Marriot. I had no expectation, but if I was staying at the Ritz and they walk right by me, I'd be like, what am I, chop-liver, right? I appreciate that they look at me, right? Different segments need different experiences. So how you think about your tickets, how you think about your sales, how you think about your support, how you think about all your interactions ought to have operating norms for those different segments. Does that make sense? Thanks for that great question. Any others? Yeah, that's a great question. My friend Syed Balki has written an article with WP Beginner about the unlimited plans or the lifetime plans. So at WP Beginner, you want to check that out. That's awesome. But fundamentally, the shortcut of that article says, which I agree with fully, is you have to know your data, right? Ritz Carlton didn't borrow Hilton's numbers. They had to know their own numbers, right? So if you're building a plug-in, you have to know, based on all the data for the last three years, for example, how often do people renew? If people only renew twice and your lifetime product purchase is worth three or four years, you solve two problems. You increase lifetime value and you accelerated your ability to bring that revenue in. You didn't wait two years. So if you do the math, lifetime value still applies, right? It's not like, but you have to be willing to do the homework, right? They don't just make that up just out of a whim. Like here, how about $300, right? They actually have to go back and do the research. What is the lifetime? If the lifetime's only two years, then let's price it at three or four, right? What's the lifetime? Your renewals, most products in the WordPress ecosystem have a renewal base that sits at between two and three years. Most people don't buy a year four or year five. So sometimes those lifetime product prices are out at four or five just to accelerate the revenue coming in. Thank you. Yeah. If as much as I can, I try, yes. So right now my team leads over crowd favorite are Brian Richards, Kerry Dills, Pat Ramsey, a guy named Christy that you don't know and Dan Beal just joined us and part of the training for them, right? Is the, if you're gonna ask me a question, make sure that you ask it in such a way that I can answer it with one letter or one word. So they'll say I have option A, B or C and I'll reply back B. I spend a little less time in airports than I did in the last couple of years and so I have more time to write. That's a great idea, Brian. But then he's like, are you okay? Are you sick? Like what happened? I was just expecting number two and be done, right? Thank you. Other questions? Yeah. You would kind of need to find a coach that could help you with this. I don't know where you could do that. Other questions? All right. Thank you very much. Take care. Thank you.