As a man truly passionate about entrepreneurship, Darrell Evans has personally started and/or operated 6 businesses since the age of 20. He is the co-founder of Yokel Local Internet Marketing, which has helped companies and like-minded entrepreneurs generate over $300 million in revenue online since its inception in 2011. These days, he finds himself sharing his passion for his craft as the host of The Mindshift Podcast, which has spawned into several spin-offs like the Mindshift Business Accelerator (MBA) and the Mindshift Growth Mastermind (MGM). As an investor, business growth coach speaker, and creator of several digital marketing and sales programs, he loves sharing the lessons that have helped him and hundreds of other businesses market profitably, grow sales predictably, and build superstar teams.
Digital marketing is not just about pushing buttons inside of those social media platforms. It’s all about knowing your customer intimately. It’s all about understanding how they think, feel, act, and speak in their normal daily life. Darrell Evans joins us on the show to talk more about marketing in times of abundance, learning when to say no, the importance of talking to your customers and small data, and The Mindshift method.
3:44 It all starts with saying, “Where do we want to go from here?”
12:49 Talk to your customers and build trust.
22:17 Darrell talks about the five-star prospect.
25:12 The sales mindset and the marketing mindset are different.
31:06 Don’t hire someone who has a degree in marketing.
37:03 If you ask a question that requires a fact, you can start to segment what’s really going on in their mind.
46:44 Customer support or customer service can be a profit center.
49:49 Darrell shares more about his Mindshift methodology
1:01:39 Darrell’s passionate plea to entrepreneurs
“Shift your mind and you’ll shift your results.”
GET IN TOUCH:
MARK LEARY:
www.linkedin.com/in/markhleary
www.leary.cc
DARRELL EVANS:
https://www.darrellevans.net/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrdarrellevans/
Production credit:
Engineering / Post-Production: Jim McCarthy
Art / Design: Immanuel Ahiable
September 1, 2021 | Wednesday
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, marketing, customer, visionary, companies, business, opportunity, mark, sales team, talking, digital, question, problem, clients, build, point, conversation, prospect, world, selling
SPEAKERS
Mark Leary, Darrell, VO
Mark Leary 00:00
So we're rolling, cool. We are live. This is you're doing it wrong with Mark Henderson Leary. And my name is Mark and I have a passion that you should feel in control of your life. And so what I do is I help you get control of that business. Because for entrepreneurs, that's the best, biggest, fastest way to get control of your life and running that business that you want to have. So you can live the life you want to live. And so part of how I do that is by letting you listen in our conversations between me and somebody else geeking out on something that's really important in the entrepreneurial world, digging into a sub subject you probably already know something about, but this time we're digging in and cracking open the secrets, or at least the details that can help you unlock your challenges in your business. And so today, I've got Darrell Evans, who's just a fantastic entrepreneur, and got lots of experience behind him. But he's particularly passionate about marketing and some of the things that dig into that. And I really want to open the conversation and talk about marketing in today's world. And you're passionate about what you call The Mind Shift method. And so welcome Darrell, how are you sir?
Darrell 01:03
Mark, I am fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show.
Mark Leary 01:06
So what are you seeing right now? For companies? And what are you recommending for companies who see huge opportunity? I see a lot of companies right now who see and are almost paralyzed by the opportunity. And they want to take advantage of it. But they're, they're stuck or having problems or just in an indecision mode. What's your recommendation for people in that spot right now?
Darrell 01:31
Wow, you're gonna hit me hard with that, they go that big? Oh, question right out of the gate. So let's, let's dive in. So companies that have great opportunity, obviously, let's recognize that they've done well, right, they've done the hard work to get to a point where, as I talked about in the world of Mind Shift, we talked about the road from inspiration to realization. And of course, when life knocks us down from breakdown to breakthrough and navigating that as an entrepreneur, as a growing firm, from startup to, you know, small, operating to growth mode is challenging in and of itself. And so when you get to the point where things are actually okay, you know, like to say sometimes cruising altitude, right, you get in the business out of starvation mode, and you're not uncertain where revenue is going to come from, you have a customer base, maybe you've got stability to a certain degree. But now everything's good, right? everything's kind of good. So I usually say from a world of marketing, and especially today, there's no shortage of noisy opportunities. And I learned a long time ago, that there's never an opportunity that you have to take. Yeah, because there's always going to be another opportunity. And so. So the first piece of thought that comes is more in the mind, before we get into tactic. And this is where I work with my clients, they're always thinking they're going to miss out on something, if they don't do something. And that's where we have to pump the brakes. So one of the first questions Mark, that I always like to ask is this, What if we don't?
Mark Leary 03:05
Yeah, exactly. On the head, I've really started to coach my clients around this concept of you got to learn to say, no, this pain you're having right now is entirely self inflicted, in the times of scarcity, that it's depressing when you have to lay people off. It's difficult when you got to reduce salaries, but it's very tangible. And now we've got people crushing their employees, crushing themselves working crazy amounts of hours. And guess what, guess why they're doing it? They're bringing it onto themselves. Because they've brought that scarcity mentality, we can't say no, why would we ever say no, because we were just in this moment of not having enough. And so how do you get people to kind of settle down?
Darrell 03:44
Yeah, you know, the so the idea is, is what if we don't do anything? But before we even get to that question, sometimes it really starts with saying, okay, where do we want to go from here? Right. So in the entrepreneurial journey, at least in my world of 30 years of multiple businesses, six businesses now, 11 years with with a company currently with my business partner, the question is always evolving. Now that we're here, where do we want to go next? And so it always comes down to this sort of let's What's our new Northstar? Like what do we want to do next? And so in that question, lies a new problem that we have to now close the gap on and I say that in marketing, and sales and the growth of any enterprise, even the growth of your own personal, being your personal wellness, your personal mindset, your personal growth, there comes a point where you have a new distinction about a new desire or a goal or a destination as a new trip that you want to take. The reality now becomes Okay, let's just unpack the marketing side of it. I always come back to what's working now. Like what is working now because in some cases, I come in The companies and the other 13 things we could do don't matter because they take a hard level of investment. Give us an easy example. Today, let's just say Google ads are working ROI is there consistency is there. It sits at the bottom of the sales funnel, let's say which is, you know, right for the sales team, meaning you're not getting leads that are waiting, wanting to buy in two years, they're ready to buy today, they're ready to have a conversation with your sales team. So the first thing we want to say is like, are we actually optimized to scale up that channel? Before we start jumping over to well, we maybe should go to Facebook, or maybe we should go to YouTube. Or maybe we should work on SEO, maybe we should, Mark. However, let's audit and make sure we're maximizing, you know, I played sports growing up, Mark, and didn't get to the pro level, all that stuff. That wasn't my calling. However, I'm such a fanatic about sports. And it does. I played football, baseball, basketball, Coach football and basketball. But I see this in every level of sports. And that is, if I've got to play. I coached defense, and I played defense, if I've got a defensive framework that works, let's just make it up for those people who listen to football, no football, sorry, if you don't, but let's just say my scheme. I'm running a 434. downline more for people on the front line three linebackers, etc. Why on God's green earth, would I change that structure to a three, four or five, three or five, two, or a dime package? If it's working? So, so I make this oversimplification, because a lot of times, it's not that we have to do more, it's and I've done this in my life in my business numerous times, I will double down on what's working to make sure we're squeezing everything we can get out of that channel. And that means optimization. First means up first, it means let's audit what's working. Number two, let's look for optimization points, or friction points that could make us better there, and maybe the investment needs to go there. Maybe our creative needs to be better to double or triple our ROI in that category. So without belaboring the point here, companies that are doing well, CEOs, founders, at the C suite who have dollars and ability to do a lot, a lot of times it's getting back to this what I call minimal, viable, you know, opportunity thinking. And a lot of times it starts with what they're already doing well, and let's make sure that stopped working or has been maximized. And a lot of times, I'm just completely setting aside any and other thoughts until otherwise necessary.
Mark Leary 07:49
So I love that. I want to unpack the metaphor a little bit, because there's actually a lot of gold in there. In the sports world, in the football world, in particular, there's a lot of the intent of setting up plays on the football field is most of the time to deceive the other team. And so that's actually a rational reason to change your scheme because you want to keep them off balance. But what we find is, some of the best coaches, particularly the historic coaches, they're like, we're gonna do this till it stops working. Because, you know, I would love to fool them. But this is working. And they cannot seem to get us, our defense is super strong right now. It's bulletproof. And so like, don't change it, like they see what we're trying, and they can't stop it. And so don't change it. And then when it doesn't work, okay, now we have to move that forward. And so in the business world, the customers are not actually trying to deceive us. I mean, there's a whole buyer-seller dance that we're going to talk about selling there is some deception built into that. But in general arc, our good customers are actually trying to find the solutions to their problems. And so they're not actually working against this, who we don't need to change the scheme to make it harder. And so why does an entrepreneur, why does the visionary or even, usually it's on the executive team, it's not maybe on the sales team, there are people who do this, but working closest to the money, that's in my mind, I say that a lot. You're describing, like, Look, we've got an almost deal, we've got an actual deal. And what can we do to optimize the dollars in our hands, as opposed to optimizing future dollars that may never realize and that's where it's highly inefficient to spend a lot of time in future potential high risk dollars, it's very efficient to say what's actually in our hands and how can we maximize that can did we maximize this deal? Did we take a deal that's profitable or not profitable and so really working to optimize what's in your possession is logical, and oftentimes, effortful to a visionary entrepreneur, who doesn't actually like that part of the process is really trying to skip steps and make this more automatic and say, like, you know, I don't want to do the hard work. I would like to just arraign better opportunities. And so it's just, It's a way of kind of take the easy way out. It's trying to shortcut and magic bullet when really it's, you got everything you need, right in your hands.
Darrell 10:09
Absolutely. And you make a great point, right? It is hard work, you know, we have a company that is doing about $30 million, that comes to mind. And they've done it extremely organically, not a lot of stuff going on online, which is what we specialize in. And what they thought they would do is since they're very cash rich, cash flows, great profit margins are fantastic. They just decided that because at the bottom of their sales process, their sales funnel, whatever you want to call it, they're at a 1.13% conversion rate traffic to I don't want to get into the exact number, but they had a 1.3 conversion rate or 1.13 conversion rate, they just figured, well, let's just add more money to the top of the funnel, which is what typically people do in marketing world, when you have cash, it's easy to write checks, or swipe credit cards, I put it into the online system. And they think that well, if we just put more at the top, right men, if that works, it does work. But it's not efficient. Right. The other way we decided was what if because if we do that now we're taking dollars from other areas of opportunity in the company operations, growth staff, it could be tech, it could be capex, you know, it could be all kinds of things that you could be needing those dollars from. So we've decided to start optimizing from the bottom up. So anytime I'm working, and we always are talking about marketing, we start with where are the results today? So that means what let's look at 1.13 and see if that's normal for your industry. Number one, let's see if other companies are outperforming that number, let's not go up to up to enough to these other what I call traffic channels or impression channels or eyeballs channels, because kind of the way I usually talk about is like, let's not go get more eyeballs. Let's see if we can take the current eyeballs and figure out what they're what you know, what's keeping them from buying from us today. Why did they choose our competitor? And so I start with a very, it's boring, it's mundane, but it works. Let's talk to the people who didn't do business with us. yet. Yeah.
Mark Leary 12:04
Right. Well, so the question you're at right now. I, I love that idea. But I like to take it even further than that. Because you're talking about where's the fount? Where's the bottom? Like, we're gonna add more eyeballs? So what about the eyeballs we've got? And I'm saying, what about the customers we've got, whether you know what, you know, all the way on the operation side, we're, we're busting at the seams, and we want to take advantage of the opportunity and we want to grow? Do you really have an understanding of your target market, what percentage of the customers you have, or people you like hanging out with, that are actually profitable for you that fire your team up that get them excited to come back into the office and do more work and work a little bit longer? Or are you grinding your team down, and therefore creating inefficiency and slowness and a difficulty to do great work for the next batch of potentially target market clients
Darrell 12:49
100% 100% agree, you know, talking to your customers, I'm actually talking about this a lot lately. And this is this newer, or updated idea of life cycle marketing, you know, lifecycle marketing, in the old school days, when I learned it in the 90s, you know, there's this life cycle, someone is unaware that you even exist. So they're technically not even they don't even care, you don't care about them. The next step is someone recognizes they've got a problem that your company's product or service could potentially solve. Now they become problem aware, but they still don't know who you are. And now they go on a journey to figure out how they might solve the problem. And it could be numerous solutions, yours or others, or not even in the category that you're in. And that's something that we have to think about in marketing, which is how do we show up as experts and authorities and build trust, even if we're recommending a solution that isn't ours? And it's a distinction, I learned this in the 90s. That is point out all the options for this now prospective customer client to solve their problem. And what's really funny is, is like, Well, when I share this with people, I talk about my days when I was in the mortgage industry, and when I was in the mortgage industry out and one on the mortgage company, here was the reality. They'd been referred to me or they saw through one of my marketing, I was a huge Consumer Direct advertising guy, which was where I built my chops in copywriting and being able to take strangers and tournament of customers and really narrow niche focus marketing. And we can talk about that if we get there. But the point of the matter was, when I was in front of back then it was in front of because the internet was a little It was early days, I wasn't on the internet till 2002. This is 94 or 567. And I'm sorry, that was in real estate. But anyway, I'm early days, we're talking face to face meetings or phone calls. Here's what I would tell him right out of the gate. We're gonna have a conversation about your objective getting a home loan, because that was the mortgage side. And I'm curious, the first thing I would do Mark was say, I'm curious, where do you bank? And let's just say they said Wells Fargo, Bank of America, one of the big, big, big big banks. And I first say before I ever get into the pre qualification questions, I would say Mark, let me ask you a question. Why didn't you apply for the home loan at Wells Fargo? And then I would wait for the answer. Why am I doing that? I'm doing something in sales called inviting the objection, or I'm inviting the scent of an objection that could show up to me down the road after I've wasted a bunch of time, it's normal for me to expect that they would go do the deal with their bank. So they would tell me, you know, I just, you know, I just have a checking account there, I don't, you know, I don't think I'm gonna get approved, or whatever the case was, I just want to know, but I also want to let them know it is an option. Second thing is, I would say, do you have a friend who's in real estate? Because this was another big common problem? Do you have a friend in real estate? Because the friend in real estate knows someone who's in banking, right? So I'm like, do you have a friend in real estate? Oh, yeah, I know this friend, Mark. Okay, well, did you talk to Mark about your wanting to buy a home? Did they refer you anybody? Because I'm really trying to figure out where does my competition live? So what have I got? Where am I saying about the opportunities to in marketing in this lifecycle stages, you've got unaware to aware of where they've got a problem, they don't know you from aware they've got a problem to searching for solutions, they still may find a solution, but they still may not find your solution from your solution. Now, if we can get you there where they see your solution, let's be clear that they have other choices. Once they have other choices, now you have to start doing the real work. Like now you have to have a USP and differentiator and build relationship. And I usually say, whoever builds trust with the client First, if a product is similar, usually it's going to win the deal. And so in sales, we always say, especially online, this is where a lot of companies, usually who've done really well before the internet, or before digital access, they're used to working with people that they've got, they build a lot of trust with, or they've had a lot of exposure to. And the internet's different, because, for example, we generate leads online through all the different channels, we're talking about Google ads, SEO, Facebook ads, you know, depends on what the company is, and what channel we're using. The reality is the person who filled out and took the action on your ad to your landing page to your form. They did it six other times, statistically speaking. So where sales teams are making mistakes, and companies when they're in this world of marketing online and trying to transition or get stronger, they fail to fault, they don't have a system for fast follow up. Because they're used to working with referrals or people they've met in industry events, and they built relationships offline. But they don't realize that that customer prospect online, doesn't know who you are, and doesn't care yet about what you've done in the past for other people. So the speed and there's a study that was done in 2012. It's published in Forbes, and it was a these were top fortune 1000. companies. I think that were in this study that 70% of CEOs felt that sorry, in a study this 70% of CEOs reported back after doing this exercise with this group, that their sales teams weren't following up with internet Leads Leads that they were paying for digital acquisition, digital customer acquisition within 72 hours, 70% not not following up to 72 hours. Now here's the rule of thumb. Is it always possible? No, it's not always possible. But here's rule of thumb, if you get in, by the way, I learned this in 2005, when I was competing with Quicken home loans, which is now Rocket Mortgage, okay, so I own a mortgage company, when I found out these hard stats, and it got validated in this Forbes article 10 years later, roughly. But here's the thing, when someone hits your website, and there are multiple ways to do it, and they fill out a form, or they engage with your chat, whatever that is, you've got to get it, you got to get in touch with them and get to them within five to 10 minutes, ideally 30 minutes if next case, and that isn't to sell them something. It's to make contact, right. In the old world of marketing. It was a forced process, where you couldn't go anywhere but to call the company or to engage in a meeting. So the contact process was forced today. It's not forced because consumers have control. And I talk about this all the time. So when we think about, okay, I've got all this money to start moving to my next direction. First of all, where do we want to go? Then we figure out like you said, niche? Who are they? And where do we find them? That's, that's one of the other questions, Mark, we're always trying to say, where do we find them? For sure. Yeah, good.
Mark Leary 19:25
So that's we're creating polarity here. And I want to peel the poles apart, because you have to have both of these understood. And one is the tactics. And particularly, I mean, a lot of a lot of my clients, a lot of people listen, this is not necessarily how the transactional digital inbound stuff, some of them are very as Dev and personal stuff and some of the stuff that applies. This first part, not as much what I'm about to say my more first part of this is if you do have inbound, and it is digital like that, my personal experience and to your point, you've got the data and my personal experience is that person who reached out to you is ready right then that's, that's the time when do they want to buy from you right, then the people do not go online and submit a form in most cases, and that's the time they're most ready to buy, and that there is some caretaking in certain situations. But if somebody does go to the effort to kind of push through the anonymous form and send information to you, you kind of have an obligation to take them out of play, because if they're doing that, right, then they're in kind of speeddating mode, they're like, I'm going to get this done. And I'm going to get somebody to have a conversation with so I can get this off my plate. So even if they're not actually going to buy in the moment, they are trying to start a relationship in the moment, and so they can get some of this stuff off their plate, so you have an instantaneous response, which is not to say that you're going to rush the rest of the process, it is to say that you're going to lose potential opportunity for somebody who can connect with them sooner. But if once you get that connection started, you can follow your process with discipline. And you can say, here's how this works over the next two or three weeks, we're going to figure out whether this fits together or not, you do not have to go into a desperate mode in the sales process. But in marketing mode, you got to be on point because the opportunity will close on you. And if that being true, you have to have done the work of who is our best customer. Because if you're in this mode, you haven't done that work and you're trying to acquire customers and these inbounds are coming all over the place. You got non-qualified and you got random things, you get caught up in these, the scarcity, and I can't listen, miss these opportunities. And I'm turning over to my sales team. And they're just trying to follow the process, you will manufacture problems for yourself, you will be in a situation of too much opportunity. And not being able to serve your best customer and not being able to serve your staff and your mission and your best contribution because you started talking what's your USP? Well, that's even that secondary work, the primary work is what is your purpose? What are you great at? What's your core focus? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What's your superior skill? Who is the best customer? Who do we like hanging out with who is easy to work with for us and who's going to feel like we're easy to work with? So you can build that in your marketing, and I can only be soliciting and eliciting inquiries from people who are like that. And when you do that, you've done a lot of no work in advance, you've repelled a lot of people who would have otherwise wasted your time. And so when you do bring those people in, it's actually just a lot easier for your system to process more of that because you're built for it.
Darrell 22:17
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. So in 2001, I learned a concept called the five star prospect. And that was of course, back then it was offline. But then we built it into how you do it online. So how do you do marketing? Well, where you're only putting your message in front of five star prospects and let's say two out of five star prospect, when they engage you. How can you filter that so your sales team is in bombarded and bogged down with the prospect that isn't a five-star prospect? And so, you can do things very simple like segmenting, right at the point of engagement. You know, I can't tell you how many companies we work with where their forms are just name, address, phone number, or name, website, phone number, email. And that doesn't tell you anything, and you're wasting a huge opportunity because almost every great marketing automation tool out there today, including what we use, which is HubSpot, the reality is you can segment right at the point of engagement, when they fill out the form and get them we do what is called custom properties, and filter those and then the next level is based on what they might have filled out on that form, route them into an appropriate level of follow up, you know, It's just it takes a little work to do it, takes a little mapping to do, a little simple mapping to do. But you're absolutely right, you lose the opportunity, if you don't have a framework to follow up at that point of engagement, they've raised their hand in some way shape, or form. And they've entered what we call that problem aware who is considering an option to solve the problem and you're one of them now because they found you through whatever marketing channel whether it's SEO Google ads or something like that.
Mark Leary 23:52
So this kind of opens the door to the mind of the buyer and the needs of the buyer, especially when you're doing this programmatically and digitally. You've got automation tools, but this is very applicable when you're not this idea, if this is a very manual process for you if you've got a sales team or if it's you as the principal are out there in the field meeting people and you know networking or whatever your method of encountering prospects are, what I see repeatedly is that the organizations who grow the fastest with the least amount of friction are led by people who really really understand their customer and what they need, what they want, what they feel, and there's very hand in glove either they were that person in a past life or maybe share those values in the current life. But whatever it is, however they acquire it, they really can identify with their best customer. And so when people start to go to digital in particular, there start to become like, how do I get this right? How do we get the feedback? What do you tell people is this particularly those visionaries who really have the highest burned own to own that? I mean, Steve Jobs is known for answer Customer Support emails, you know, he knew what his customers need and felt. And so everybody's got that obligated, every visionary has got an obligation, what do you tell people who are kind of like, hey, let's run some ads? And how do you really capture that voice?
Darrell 25:12
You know, so I, when I think about the visionary, and I think about, you know, who got to who is at the place where they now have a new direction, a new destination, I would just say this, if even if digital isn't your first, or even your second, third or fourth, Pinterest, in this next new, daunting adventure, be present for the information in the education, even if you're not going to be the technician, even if you're not going to oversee it, even if the CMO or head of marketing, in some cases, and sometimes, this is a huge mistake when they put head of sales involved now with Head of Marketing, it is an absolute disaster. Because the sales mindset and the marketing mindset are different. At some point, they look the same, but they're not. The reality is just as a Visionary Visionary, get the information. Here's what I see a lot. I see the visionary who has a successful company who is ready to write the check for the budget, $100,000 $200,000 budget, whatever it may be. And they just write the check, but they appoint someone who one of three things either the person is youthful, inexperienced, it doesn't matter how old they are, doesn't matter if they just got out of college, or if they just changed careers, or they just got a certification. The reality is execution. And digital is not just pushing buttons inside of Google ads, or Facebook ads. It's human psychology, consumer behavior. It's understanding your ideal customer. It's understanding how they think how they feel, how they act, and how they speak, in their normal daily life. Unfortunately, useful marketers who anybody can go set up a Facebook page, a Google page, a LinkedIn page, and all those platforms are designed to take your money. That's how they make money. 96 or so percent of Google's revenue comes from Google ads, Facebook's the same thing. Don't be mad at the platform, get the education, right. But it doesn't mean you have to become the expert at the platform, you have to be x, you have to become an expert at the three ways you can use those platforms. So that's really what I tell people as visionaries, you're not expected to be involved. But when you're ready to write the check and make the investment to go to the next level, be present in those upfront meetings with whoever the provider is or your team. And also be ready to make the investment in getting that person educated. So if that's a younger, experienced person, they just don't have enough reps on the platform. And the platforms don't teach you how to generate leads, they teach you how to build campaigns. So you can take the Facebook ads course and the Google ads and get all the certifications. I see him all the time because I interview all these people. They come in with the certification thinking that makes them a good marketer. It does not. It makes you an educated person, just like when you graduated from college, you now have the information. But now you don't have the experience, right? It's like, I know what a football is, doesn't make me a football player. I can hold the basketball like LeBron James, doesn't mean I'm right. So I think visionaries have to be present through that process so that they understand what's the new dynamic, especially if they were offline because they want it to work as it did offline, it doesn't work that way online. So that's, I don't want to does that someone else.
Mark Leary 28:14
That's great. I love it. And I think a lot of visionaries. Just like any entrepreneur, who came from kind of a self taught street smarts, where there's even people who are not, they encounter discipline in the business that they don't fully understand. And then they kind of steer around it. Like some of the most successful entrepreneurs I know come from a sales background. And so when they understand selling, and it doesn't scare them, the crafts, people who have a skill set, as they grow up, sometimes they kind of bump their head on the selling, and they're like, I don't get it. I'm gonna hire somebody to do that. And that's usually a recipe for a problem. And so for marketing, it's kind of the next level up if you manage to get scrap your way to selling well enough, like how do you really develop a decrease in demand and lead generation, a lot of times visionaries or senior leadership are like, I don't fully understand that. I'll hire a marketer. And so there's a lot of disciplines inside of marketing many, many disciplines, like more than we can even really enumerate. But if you're talking about public relations, and digital and paid and inbound and outbound and telemarketing, and programs, spread, strategy, creative, all that sort of stuff, like forget that for a second, just understand that there's, I think, three tiers that you need to break apart in your mind. And the first one is the brand strategy, which is different than what I call expert tactics, which is different than sort of programs and follow through and that kind of thing. And there's really even a kind of a fourth, which is like the creative, which is actually I think what people most get distracted on like, oh, I know someone who can do great graphics and logos and like, that's my marketer. Yeah, that's not your marketer. No, that's not the greatest. So you probably need that but like, you know, you can write that down. You can get that, you can buy that lots of places. And so the expert tactics i think is missing in a lot. cases and you got to really be clear that somebody has to know how to sort out lots of ways we can spend your time and money. And you want somebody who understands what the consequences are like, what, what does Google do, but how much does it cost? Do we need to know what cost per customer acquisition looks like? And you probably do, by the way, and so you should hire somebody for that in most cases. But from the visionary perspective, this brand strategy, you got to own a lot of that, if you're a big company, and you need somebody really doing deep market analytics, or if you're sophisticated, really competitive, but you might need some really razors, sharp expertise in that. But as the visionary, you got to own your identity on some level, and you got to empower and push yourself into that meeting, and Satan, that's no, that's not us, like great idea sound like that the costs make sense. But that is not who we are, we are this. And that is your job, and you must stand firm. And if you can't stand firm, you might not know what your identity is, and you better go find out. You're great I,
Darrell 31:06
I do. And Mark and I say this for your audience, who because we're talking about the visionary who has to make this hire, or maybe the visionary has been in this role, and they've had multiple people in the role, and they just haven't gotten to quite there yet. I'm going to share something with your audience right now that I think as the visionary they should, they can appreciate. And here's this, myself, my agency, we've been successfully hiring and growing marketing staffs in our agency, and then obviously, transitioning those and giving advice to companies. From a consulting standpoint, let me tell you, the four, everyone gets puts an ad out there for marketer, you can call the marketer, whatever you want Facebook ad Google, no matter what the title, technically is of marketer, but if they say that they're a digital marketer, here's something really interesting. Don't hire someone who has a degree in marketing. I'll say that again, I'm going to tell you that I'm going to, I'm going to tell you the four disciplines, that if they studied this in college, and they happen to have drifted into the digital marketing space, you're going to be in good shape. And let me tell you, those four disciplines, the first one is creative writing, or journalism. Nothing online happens without written word, Nothing happens without written copy. So if you find someone who's got a creative writing background journalism background, that's an interesting if they found their world their way to digital, they're going to be really important to a lot of aspects of digital number two, this is going to strike people a little odd criminal justice or law. If they have a law degree, or they went down a criminal justice path. Let me explain why. There is both the objective and subjective way of building an argument, right, there are law facts. And then there are application to the facts. There's a lot of critical thinking that goes on in the world of law, you cannot be in law without the ability to critically think in digital marketing, you're going to get data, there's no shortage of it. In fact, it's bloated. It's mind boggling. Everyone wants to
Mark Leary 33:02
hire a digital firm, and they give you that frickin report. It's 32. That report, and you're so proud of it.
Darrell 33:09
There's so proud of that. How do you pull apart that data and figure out what matters? Okay, so criminal justice law, that's another one. Here's another one that throws people a little bit off. And that is psychology. If they've got a background in psychology, you have someone now who can also now start to understand brand psychology, consumer behavior, these are critical components to being successful in digital. And the fourth is economics. I have. So listen, this isn't necessarily that I put in the ad, in my job descriptions that a requirement is you have to you have to have a degree in these areas. But when I see right, and I've been doing this now for I've been looking at, I don't remember when I've gotten this information. But it comes back to this idea that to be successful in marketing, especially digital, you have to have what's known as a T shaped marketing framework, a T shaped marketer means they've got, you can either build a team that has this T framework, which means that there's a broad level of things that happen in marketing, but then there's a deep level of understanding and expertise that's required, and it ends up forming a tee. Now, we don't have visual here, so I won't be able to go much deeper than that. And again, if you want me to.
Mark Leary 34:24
And Google's made this famous, and I think it's great concept. And it's so yeah, so the idea though, is just imagine it right?
Darrell 34:31
Yeah. But the issue though is getting the right people in the seat. see a lot of people that come in and you think someone with a marketing background or marketing and advertising degree would be the perfect fit. And unfortunately, I have found that they're really book smart at the words, they use the kit. They use the vernacular very well. But it's funny that the critical thinking aspect to succeed in digital far exceeds what I would have ever thought. By the way, I have a degree in finance and I studied portfolio theory. So I wanted to go work on Wall Street initially, that was one of my first passions, one of my first loves. I have a degree in finance. My degree didn't even show up in this list when I was working with this consultant. But I also couldn't understand why I was successfully able to come over and become such a strong person in the in the world of digital analytics and conversion optimization. And it had to do with my critical thinking about building a portfolio in college and being able to think about risk management, and also small data. I remember building my first portfolio and one of my exercises to graduate from school, I had to buy five stocks and build a portfolio and I had to go do fundamental analysis in the whole bit. That's not, that's not a big portfolio, five stocks is not a big portfolio. However, what I'm saying is these four disciplines, if you see someone in their background, that they've got those disciplines, and they've now made it to the marketing world, you've got someone, you know.
Mark Leary 35:52
Here's a letter, you said, if I create a concept, yeah, concept of the small numbers. I've seen this through the years, and it was really kind of rude awakening and not right away, it was disappointing to me at first, when I started doing marketing, and I would look at the data come in, and we're trying to do analytics, I'm a very logical perspective. And we'd get like, the smallest little numbers, okay, we got four leads, okay, or two leads, or one? And you're like, Okay, what conclusions can we draw from this? Like, I don't know.
Darrell 36:24
So really be able to do to make sense out of small numbers.
Mark Leary 36:28
Yeah. So it takes some real judgment, you've got to have some real context, you're gonna have to pull a lot of information that's not in that spreadsheet, from a conversation with them, you're gonna have to pick up the phone and talk to that prospect and go on gut feel and draw some hypotheses about the people you talk to who were not in the sales funnel or not in the marketing funnel. And you're right. And I've seen so many marketing organizations I've worked with, they just they live in that damn spreadsheet. And they're just watching the numbers go up and down. And you ask them, what does that mean in a qualitative way? They have absolutely no idea.
Darrell 37:03
Yeah, one of the things with small data that you can use, and this is something we a lot of times we work with companies that did have done really well offline. And maybe they're just getting started online, or just taking online, seriously, for either the first or second time. And the data is going to be small, right? We can't compare it to, you know, some of the things they may have been doing offline with their investments. So what's interesting about small data, and this is where, again, slightly tactical, but it's just the same way we would do it offline, we'd ask a question. You know, Mark, if I want to know something about you, Mark, how long have you been in business? That's a question. It's a Yeah, it's a very, it's an easy answer. Question. It's factual. So I always say that in the world. And what I've learned in selling is, if you ask a question that requires a fact not an opinion, you can start to segment what's really going on in their mind. And in the absence of a true fact, where let me give you an example. someone hits your form, and you get four leads. So let's just say you're running a campaign, you get four leads, you spent $2,000, whatever, let's say your product or service sells for $50,000. So $500, cost per lead. Okay, I can make that work, if we can figure out exactly what's the endgame for this customer. And if they're our prospect, our five-star prospect that we were talking about before? Well, you only have four leads. So you don't know if the campaign is working, but you spent $2,000. And now you got to read up the next month. And your CEO is like, right, yes, he is like, well, we only have four leads and nobody closed. Yeah. So here's what's interesting, you take the four leads, and you no matter where they are in the process, and use and you can do this really at the beginning and this better at the beginning, then 30 days after they've touched base with you because they're less likely to reply. At the beginning of almost every marketing campaign, we try to do something called an engagement sequence, that engagement sequence. And a lot of times you don't get the phone number online, let's be clear that the more information you ask from a stranger, the less information, the less chance you're going to get them to convert. So we want to minimize friction with a stranger who doesn't know our brand, even if they may be searching for the problem, a solution to the problem that we can solve. We try to minimize what we ask on the initial conversion, then we'd like to try to do something called an engagement sequence or do engagement dialog. And it's so simple. It's simply this instead of bombarding them with an eight, an eight email drip system, which is what a lot of people I see people doing, you know, here, you came through, set up a meeting by this, does this go here? Why don't we just ask them a question? what problem are you trying to solve today? So that's an open-ended question that gets less, it gets fewer replies. But to your point earlier, if we really understand the problems that our clients have, then you send them a multiple-choice email. In my world, for example, there are four key things that people want to solve. When I get asked to come to the conversation. They lack strategy. They lack the skill to execute the strategy, even if they think they've got a strategy. They lacked the time to do all of what it takes to execute the strategy, even if they have the skill. And what I usually find there is a company that's 30, 50,60, 80 million, they hire one person to do it all. And that person is drowning, right? And going back to the T-shaped marketer conversation, they're not even skilled to do it all. And the fourth thing is, we've been doing this for a while, we're just not getting an ROI. So I can easily send an email, the first email after you engage with my brand online and simply say, Hey, Mark, I noticed you were on the site today, my customers that we tend to work with and help the best, have one of these four problems, can you tell us which one of them applies most to you? It's basically a simple survey, the goal is a reply. And if you get a reply, that is also part of that customer feedback journey, whether you actually sell them or not. And so a lot of people miss that simple step on small data, as really, it works really great on big data too. But on small data, that's how you begin to segment is the message working?
Mark Leary 40:58
Yeah, so a couple of things I want. So you send both of those? You send open-ended end and then multiple choice?
Darrell 41:04
No, I would usually no, I'm usually going to send if I have a clear picture of what my client's problems come sees, you know, you're on the seasoned business. Yeah, I, I know what those three or four things are. And, you know, so again, the other mistake there just to just be tactical is the human brain. There's you know, Paradox of Choice is a real challenge, you have to be mindful of the Paradox of Choice. The brain, I've learned so much about psychology, you would have thought that I spent, you know, 10 years in psychology, but because you, when you do the reps in sales, as much as I've done, I did 7000 consultations in the mortgage industry, I sold 70, 100 loans there I was in real estate when you do enough, and I've 11 years now working with an agency, in the agency world, with business owners, both consulting, coaching agency clients, etc. Do you see patterns, the Paradox of Choice, which, which is how we actually started this conversation, right? There are so many things you can do, and it hurts the brain, the brain is tired. The brain's job is to help you conserve energy. So let's be good marketers. And let's not ask our client or our prospect to waste energy, give them a simple way to respond. And if anybody wants to look up the I think it's called the grape jelly experiment or the grape jam experiment. Yes, done some time ago, where there was 33 Custom jam store had 33 types of jam or jelly on the shelf and couldn't understand why people weren't buying well. There are too many. There are too many flavors. You know, they remember Baskin Robbins 31 flavors. You know, I'm not sure if they're still around.
Mark Leary 42:34
They are way more than 31 flavors. Actually. They actually it's actually catchy, but that your point is exactly right. And Malcolm Gladwell brings it up, I think in at least one of his books. And Daniel Pink also brings it up in at least one of his books where when you give people 23 choices, you sell less than when you only give them you get none. They make no choice. There are too many. It's too many hairsplitting, you make it really closer to binary and people. People make choices. You just nailed it.
Darrell 42:59
Mark, I can't tell you how many times I used the word binary like every stage of your decision. No, I'm serious. You just, I love my word. I laughed because I love that word. People are encouraged to them. Yes, sir. If we can make our decisions more binary, we will get further faster, right? Are we going to do Facebook ads? Or are we going to do LinkedIn ads? Not Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Instagram as ticked know, where does our customer live? And let's make a choice. And until we figure it out on a platform, come on, man.
Mark Leary 43:31
So I struggle to that exact issue, exact issue. And you're like, Oh, yeah, that hurts. But I don't want to miss something. Right? I feel like, if I'm not over here, yeah. Yeah. I was gonna ask something. Oh, so? Well, I forgot. But I lost it again. What was the lead into that we were talking about, Oh, I know what it is. So I think the clear path in selling and in marketing and is harder in marketing, I think, I don't think to do it, is to regard or gain rich information. And particularly in digital, it's very, not rich. But could it has the potential to seem like it can be rich, because we could ask a million questions with a lot of people try to do and see your point breaks the whole process, a great drip email and all this stuff. It goes with that. But when I'm working with a company who's working towards an automated online process to sell their stuff and they really don't know that, what the customer needs and like you, okay, forget that for a minute. You call them you know, get a lead. And before you're ready to automate this whole process, it's a cost, you know, it's a $10 purchase, like, well, you don't have the money to call every single prospect like well, you for your marketing budget for your brand strategy, you'd better spend that time and money to understand what's on their mind. If they say, Hey, I'm interested. Your next question needs to be why. What made you come to me today? What's what would solve the problem for you, and you have to somewhere in your process, and I think at all times, I think a lot of companies would get comfortable in growth. Stop asking the questions, they understand the buyer persona well enough to be consistent and they delegate the selling and closing into their marketing and selling teams in the visionary gets detached and kind of the businesses is operating at steady maintenance or somewhat growth clip. And then a pandemic comes in, suddenly everything's changing, and they don't know how to get feedback from their customer in terms of what matters to you, and they don't have those clear relationships, and they don't have the trust to get the answer. But in the end, the answer to the problem is the same. You got to go back to the prospect. And at a time when they're thinking about something they need, you got to say, tell me more? What's on your mind? What would really matter to you? And if you don't have that information, one way or the other, you are losing touch with your customer?
Darrell 45:43
Yeah, you just can't buy your way to get information. So that's a great point.
Mark Leary 45:48
Yeah, that's a great way to say that I didn't, yeah, so when we try to buy some intel, you can size the market, you can, you can determine whether this is worth pursuing or not. But you're not going to lever up your close rate, you're not going to level up your exact target market where you have very, very satisfied very, very loyal clients and customers who feel like you understand them without rich conversations of listening and observation. And so you have to build into your process. As a leader, as a marketer, as a salesperson as anything, you've got to have a channel to observe and get that rich, very intangible information that goes back and fuels some very tangible steps in the process, which might be one of the four, which one of the four provinces are hitting you right? Now, there are 4 million things you could put in that box, and you have to be very educated to know the top four.
Darrell 46:44
Yeah, you know, it's funny, we're talking about this now because something is talking about this next week. And it is this idea that customer service can be a profit center, and not just customer service, customer support, whatever you call it, after the fact, can be a profit center, not just from a cross-sell, upsell standpoint, but from the data going back up to the top of the funnel, the top of the channel, right? And that's where a lot of companies make mistakes. You know, in my world, we're always saying, what is the experience? What is the customer experience, like after they're your customer, and that is both if they're happy, if they're sad, and are we taking a chance to really understand that, and one of the processes that we use has to do with a very simple thing, it can start with as simple as an NPS. And then from there, the follow up on anybody there who are detractors or anyone who just couldn't give you the highest score. And it could be as simple as that if your company has been around for a while. So it doesn't have to be complicated doesn't have to be, you know, doesn't mean you have to spend all your money calling every customer. But if you can get a customer to fill out a simple 10 second survey to make a binary decision, right? On a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to refer us to a family friend or colleague, whatever the question, you know, is applicable. Those that are not I think NPS is eight or eight or above you should be reaching out to those folks. Right? And the simple follow-up question to that is, what would make you know, right, so if there are seven, what would make you an eight? If you're an eight, what would make you a nine, you're just asking for the variant, the variable, there's something on their mind that you can pull from? And if so, it's those kinds of things. And so maybe you've got 1000 customers, you send out the survey, 20% of them fill out the survey. And now out of those you've got, you know, hopefully, you're doing things well, you got 15% of those people that chose eight or less, guess who you're calling? That's where you get your data from. That's where you get your data. So you don't have to overcomplicate it, and doesn't have to be a massive research project. Right? Well, so
Mark Leary 48:49
I get on the soapbox about this listening and observation. And I kind of went back in time to when I was doing that for the first time. And I realized I was a horrible listener, a horrid visitor. I had a vision. And I wasn't great about figuring out if it was relevant to my clients, and I was pushing on it. And I think it wasn't I don't think they cared. I think it caused me to spend a lot of time and money and energy on things that were not needed and not real. And I was not willing to, I didn't know how I might have been willing to accept the truth. But I don't even know how to find the truth. So I wouldn't give myself the opportunity to accept the truth. But that I don't want I we've actually covered a lot. And we're kind of nearing the end of our time. But I don't want to get out of here without hearing your story about how you have learned to make peace with the facts. And so that kind of to me might be a way to tie that in. I don't even know the detail of the story. But, you know, I do think it's really important, especially right now that people have a sense of what's real and what's not. And fantasy can be very expensive right now.
Darrell 49:49
Oh, that's an interesting way. I've never heard that fantasy can be very expensive. I like that. So I think you're referring to some of the mind shift methods in the process that you found them. Mind Shift. Yeah, sure. So, you know, the Mind Shift podcast, which is my show, people ask me, Why did I choose the word mind shift, and it goes back to a story that I can identify. It was a personal life story has nothing to do with business. But in 1997, 1998, the mother of my two children, my first two children, and I, we split, and on a moment's notice, without telling me, she decided to move to another state. In fact, I walked into, you know, our apartment at the time and found that they were gone. So at this point, wow, I was forced to figure out how I was going to be a father to my two boys at the time, from 1075 miles away, and my first inclination was to go there to where they were, and then shortly realized that it really wasn't in the plan, that was just my reaction. So that was one of a couple of times. So the idea of the mind shift method was, I had to figure out how to make peace with the facts, you know, the advice I was getting, although it was loving advice, was that, Oh, she shouldn't have done that to you. And let's be clear about something Mark, let me just say, for the record, I was a jerk in that relationship, I'm just gonna leave it at that. Okay. I'm not saying I was, you know, I didn't do anything crazy. I wasn't abusive, or anything like that. But I made my mistakes. No, you know, I always say that if, if your life is screwed up, and if your life is screwed up, you were there when it got screwed up. So you can't just blame the other person. Like, you know, I'm saying, If something's not going, right, you were there. So take ownership. And that was a lesson I've learned a long time later is that own everything. So long story short, at this age, though, I don't own it. I was making excuses. But anyway, I had to learn how to make facts. And then another fact that I was also dealing with, which was a fact that really was affecting me was that I didn't find out until I was 22. That my father that I knew as my father was not my father. He was my stepfather that my father chose to marry another woman after he got my mom pregnant. And so now I'm dealing with the fact that okay, I can't be and I'm not, you know, I've forgiven him. There's no animosity or anything like that. But I have new decisions to make now. So my method has a, he comes out of making peace with the facts, I wasn't going to get her to move back to my city. I wasn't going to live there. The kids are eight into, I have to figure out what am I going to do. The court gave me visitation and all that we worked on all the stuff that was no goofiness worked all this stuff. But I've got to travel to go pick them up to bring them back here. So that means I'm buying plane tickets and traveling both ways until they're 13 years old when Southwest would allow them to fly as unaccompanied minors. And so I've got to do all of that for five years. And so the idea was to make peace. And I say in business and life, if we're going to get past the thing, this idea from inspiration, realization, or when life knocks us down from breakdown to breakthrough, it starts with making peace with the fact step two, is to make a decision, like, what am I going to do? And a lot of times we make decisions by default because we live in the land of reasons or excuses. Well, that shouldn't have happened to me because they wronged me, or the company fired me because of whatever or the pandemic is the reason or the excuse at the time of our present history right now. And to 2021 coming off the pandemic. The reality is the facts are the facts. We don't control the facts. Sometimes, yeah, we may have participated. And in the case of a pandemic, we didn't participate. It just happened. So we got to make peace with the facts. Number two, make a decision in that decision-making process. It's who do I want to be? Who am I going to become? And how am I going to operate now with the facts? And so then, and again, I'm going quickly through it. Step three, though, is where things get hard. And that is what is the plan? What is the plan for me to go from this point of fear, frustration, anger, hatred, any of the emotions, I'm not saying that's what I went through, I'm just saying those emotions are normal. But now and this goes back to a concept that I read about in the slight edge book. And that is apt when we make a decision. And then we start to follow a plan of action. And sometimes we need help with the plan of coach, we need a mentor, we need a mastermind group. We need some help. Sometimes it could be a spiritual leader or guide that has to help us with the plan. Then the key though is you have to renew the commitment to the decision in terms of execution long after the feeling has left you. So my decision to be a good father started in 1999, which was the year I decided to come back. I moved there for a year came back. Now the decision kicks in. And again, this can apply to the business if I'm gonna make a new decision about marketing or the growth of my business or I've got to make a new decision. And then once I make it, I've got to stick to what it takes. And the reality is life's not going to just be that easy. So and step four, of course, is making it happen. So make peace, make a decision, make a plan and you might need help with that plan. And then making it happen and making it happen is the iterative part. Process mark. And you know, this leading entrepreneur, we all are listening to this entrepreneurial firm. We know that this process exists. I didn't. It's not magical. It's very logical, but it's tough in practice. And so when I'm talking to people I'm always evaluating, have you really made peace with the fact that x, and we talk about that for a while, and we really try to if we're not at peace with it, there's nothing I can help you, I could be the person to guide who's at step three with the plan. But my plan is just nonsense. If you haven't made peace, if you're still making excuses, or you still have a ton of reasons, then you're not actually going to move forward. And this is where I think all of us face this in life. And, again, this all happened to me, this is my story. This is, you know, and it wasn't until 2020 when something goofy happened. And someone close to me said, How do you do it? Like, how do you just get through weirdly stressful things that would just take someone else out, like some people can end up on a path of, you know, destruction, and it was a weird thing? And it was a personal life thing. Again, momentary wasn't anything as significant as to has 98. And there are multiple of these as years go on. But that's the plan. It's a simple process. I've been teaching it through our podcasts and through our coaching community. And I think it detaches from this tactical thinking. It detaches, from even strategy, it gets back to the mind. And are we willing to do battle with our mind, and if we can do battle and win that more often than not, that's what actually helps us get through those tough moments in life. Because the reality is, no one said life was easy. No one said this journey was okay. I mean, you have to be a little bit naive to think that it's just gonna be that easy, but it doesn't yet, and it doesn't matter if it's personal business, you know, I lost 38 pounds, I was not that 38 is super, super overweight, but I was 38 pounds overweight, you know, seven, eight years ago. And I had to, I had to make a decision, I had to make a united make peace with the fact that I've been eating bad for a while. I didn't put on 30 pounds in 10 weeks. So why do I think I'll lose 38 in 10 weeks, right? It's just silly. And so I went on a one pound a month process. And so it's like, that was my plan, not to say you can't go on a 10 Week Diet, crash, and lose whatever. So anyway, that's the that's the methodology. And it seems to resonate with people as I share it with them. And again, we detach from the thing that we're actually really working on, to get into the mind and really get people to, to feel okay with their new decisions.
Mark Leary 57:40
So what I love is that connects on a lot of I mean, personally, and business and all that, but just tied to the subject we specifically got here. I mean, anybody can and should use that thinking anywhere in their life. And it makes sense. But we've already been talking about that since we started the conversation, talking about the ability to say no, and when we don't say no, that's, that's an absolute denial. That's all of our ability to deny or have a denial of our power. And we are self-sabotaging. And your story is one of the acceptance, it's absolutely it's like, you know, and it's painful acceptance. And sometimes in business, we're trying to, you know, did our cheese move? Or are we just not willing to do the work? Are we allowing ourselves to be governed by the tyranny of the urgent rather than taking some pause and reflecting? Where are we going? Why are we going there? I love us early in the conversation, you said, you know, maybe there's the next new note North Star. And what is that new North star? I find a lot of times people, just ignoring their existing north star in the urgency. And if they take a minute and they say is the North Star change is no, it really hasn't really the same. And we should double down on it. It's a pretty kick-ass North Star. So I just love the idea of acceptance and self-observation. And I do think that boils down to right now, the reason problems of abundance are so hard is because the noise goes it's so loud, that self-observation and that ability to reflect goes away. And it's easier, so much easier to just be ruled by the inbox and the phone calls and other people's priorities. And it is hard, it's easier actually in times of scarcity you're like I got nothing to do I guess I'll reflect you know, it's like I got 80 hours of work to do this week that Oh, I can't possibly reflect I couldn't possibly take a clarity break and observe on what I want to do and what can I possibly say no to that I've got all these people I will let down. But actually, the urgency is quite a bit higher because you can really hurt damage yourself and damage your clients and damage your reputation and damage the lives of the people who are under your care as a business leader. So I love the story. I love what we talked about. This time has flown by in normally I try to get this head cut off by about 45 minutes and we just clicked over the hour mark. But I think this has been a lot of fun for me and I'm great For the time together, like by spending the time it was great. It's awesome, for sure. And we'll continue the conversation we got more to talk about in different ways in different conversations. Is there anything you feel like we missed that you want to make sure we kind of pack in here?
Darrell 1:00:16
You know, Mark, you enjoy the conversation. I always love these talks with leaders, I love talking both in the broad and down into the, to the technical and the nitty-gritty. We've done a lot of that today, specifically for your audience, I just think, you know, today, we have an opportunity as leaders in the midst of coming out of this pandemic season, and we're not quite there yet, depending on what time this airs, I think leaders have four opportunities, and that is to be really confident in the face of the unknown. Because right now, we're not quite sure that we're going to go back to face-to-face conferences and trade shows and all of some of the traditional other ways to build a business. So have confidence that you're going to make it and I think a lot of your clients are confident. I think number two is to really think about contingency plans. What if we don't come out of lockdown sooner than later? I think the other side of it is capitalizing capital on what's working now, doubling down, tripling down, and capitalizing on areas of the opportunity that your organization is not doing really well. And, and those are three ideas that I think as leaders, you know, sort of my see framework, you know, so really be confident capitalizing and contingency plans. Those are just some of the areas that I'm always focused on. And I'm always talking to clients about, and maybe we didn't touch on that. So hopefully that was helpful.
Mark Leary 1:01:34
Okay, good. So what is your passionate plea to entrepreneurs right now?
Darrell 1:01:39
You know, it sounds simple, it sounds simple. Shift your mind, and you'll shift your results. It sounds simple. But that's how I live. And that's what urgently shifts your mind with whatever it is you're working on. If you want a new destination, if your North Star doesn't look as North as it used to, shift your mind, and it'll shift your results because in between, that will shift your actions your plans. And so that's as simple as I could say.
Mark Leary 1:02:04
I love that. And it's important to underscore that that is not an effort full-on-demand thing. You can't schedule 30 minutes Monday morning to shift your mind. Take some reflections, some whitespace, some clarity, and you might have to do it on a vacation or clarity breaking during the week. But giving yourself that space to reflect and ask yourself, What am I doing? Is it working? Am I What am I feeling? And it doesn't necessarily come when you want it to but if you give it the space, they will it will find you if you're patient. So, man, I love this. This is awesome. If somebody wants to continue the conversation with you, how do they find you?
Darrell 1:02:46
two places they can find me easiest. The mind shift podcast is on all podcast networks. Wherever you listen to a show. The mind shift podcast is everywhere. And number two, if they'd like to connect with me on my website, Darrell evans.net. And they can connect with me.
Mark Leary 1:03:02
Awesome. Well, that's it for today, everybody. If you found this useful, please share it with somebody else who you also might think it's useful. And if you've got feedback for us, we'd love it good and bad. It's so powerful, so helpful, even the little tidbits just really, really, really meaningful to us. And so we will see you next time you're doing it wrong with me, Mark Anderson.
VO 1:03:24