Identifying Your Buyer Pt. 1 with Tim Parkin

Welcome to Season 2 of the Exploring Growth Podcast! Our host, Lee Murray, launches an exhilarating new series of episodes with the brilliant Tim Parkin as the inaugural guest. As a global marketing consultant and exceptional strategist, Tim is full of with invaluable insights to share. In this episode, Lee and Tim delve into the importance of understanding your buyer in the realms of marketing and advertising.

Listen to this captivating discussion on the importance of finding the right target audience, creating a compelling message, and consistently engaging with them. They also explore the factors involved in defining the buyer, including the triggers that motivate individuals to make purchases and the psychological processes behind their decision-making.

Thank you for watching. If you are enjoying what you hear, please consider sharing it with a colleague or a friend.

Have a guest recommendation, question, or just want to connect?
Go here: https://www.harvardmurray.com/exploring-growth-podcast

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Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehmurray
Tim - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-consultant-tim-parkin

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Lee Murray (00:00:01) - Welcome back to Exploring Growth. So glad you're here. This is pretty exciting news I want to share with my podcast followers. About a year ago, I started exploring growth podcasts and I've had the opportunity to meet and interview so many great people, wonderful people and experts in their field. And I wanted to change. I wanted to do something new. And I figured, why not use the podcast to share some of the things that I've learned along the way in my career? So starting something new, and this is the first episode in that series, what I'm doing is building a series of courses to document and share a lot of the knowledge that I picked up over the years, experience things I've read and watched and been a part of help clients work for companies, putting all of that into a series of courses and I want to share that experience of building that along the way. And that's what I'm going to do here. So we're going to start this series with the first course being How to build a Strategic Marketing Plan.

Lee Murray (00:01:03) - And this episode is the first module in the first course, which is identifying your buyer. And we're going to get to talk with Tim Parkin, who was my first guess when we first started the podcast, which is pretty cool. And a close friend of mine, he's also a global marketing consultant. He works with huge companies and he's, as you'll see, an amazing guess, has a lot of information. And as you also see, the sort of format has changed a little bit in terms of how the interview is set up. This these episodes are going to be used inside of the course on building. So you're getting a preview of what someone who buys this course will see once they get inside the the course. So I hope you enjoy. And let's get to talking with Tim. I'm really excited to have Tim Parkin a close friend and colleague and, you know, comrade in the business of marketing and consulting here. So welcome on ten.

Tim Parkin (00:02:05) - Thanks Lee. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to to be here and to talk through everything marketing and specifically buyer personas.

Lee Murray (00:02:14) - Yeah. So it was almost exactly a year ago I had you on when we started this podcast. So exciting to, to launch off into this new kind of direction and I wanted to have you back because I intended to whenever I decided whatever was next, I'm going to have you first. Again, so excited to have you here to talk about building or identifying a buyer as you're looking at building a marketing plan. So I have a series of questions here. I want to kind of walk through and talk talk through during this episode. And, you know, we're we're really thinking about this in light of a small to midsize B2B service based company. That's the person who's probably going to be watching this video in the course. So let's start with this is fresh. You know, they're starting over and saying, okay, we want to do this really, really well. Okay. I couldn't think of a better person to bring on and start talking about this. So excited to hear your answers. Why they should they why is it important for them to dedicate time to outlining and documenting who their buyer is?

Tim Parkin (00:03:22) - Everything in marketing and advertising is predicated on knowing who your buyer is.

Tim Parkin (00:03:28) - If you don't communicate well with the person who matters, with the person who can make the buying decision, with the person who has the money and the ability to say yes to what you're doing, then you're wasting your time and your resources and your budget. So it's fundamentally important to first and foremost understand who can actually buy what we're selling, what we're offering, and then how do we find those people and how do we create a message that's compelling to them? And how do we get that message in front of them consistently and over time? So everything I would say starts with figuring out who is the buyer.

Lee Murray (00:04:04) - And I couldn't agree more. I mean, I'm building a whole course around it, right? I think that you and I are wired very similarly that, you know, if we see a nail, we're going to be a hammer when it comes to, you know, identifying your buyer, building a marketing strategy, think doing a lot of thinking before acting. And I think there's a lot of merit to that.

Lee Murray (00:04:25) - As you're saying. You know, the as I would say, the most important thing you can do for your your marketing plan is to start at the beginning. And that is who is your buyer, Right. The more you identify about who that buyer is and we're not talking about, you know, things that you should know already if you're already in business. And that is for firms graphically, you know, the size, company revenue employees and those kind of things. You know, maybe maybe the role that they they hold. Those are all important things. But we're also talking about more psychographic type of things or are even more of the detailed demographic type of things. Yes. You know, getting into these deeper elements and, you know, really understanding the buyer.

Tim Parkin (00:05:13) - Yes. And I think understanding just to underscore what you're saying, means a lot of things. And it doesn't mean what people probably have heard that you should write out this, you know, buyer persona of a single mom who's 45, who has two kids.

Tim Parkin (00:05:29) - You know, that stuff, some of it you already know. So you don't need to write it down and some of it isn't going to help you. But a lot of this has to do with the triggers of why people buy the psychology of what state are people in and what's going to motivate them to be interested to pay attention. And also, what is their solution now? Because everyone already has a solution to their problem. It may not be the ideal solution. It may be no solution. But they have something some way they're dealing with this problem now. And you need to understand that as part of understanding who your buyer is, what state they're in, and how you can get them from where they are to where you want them to be and where they want to be, frankly.

Lee Murray (00:06:07) - Yeah. And that takes me right to the next question, which is what are the most some of the most important aspects to define about your buyer? Right. You know, just like want to put myself in the shoes of someone who's watching this, and that is maybe you are going after small manufacturers.

Lee Murray (00:06:24) - I can even think specifically co packers, you know, in the southeast and of those co packers, you're dealing with the facility safety person and whatever their role may be. Okay. That's great. You know, you're probably 40% of the way there and now the real work starts, right? So now let's get into what are some other aspects about that buyer. You know, not the account, but the buyer themselves. One's going to make the decision. What should they be looking to to define?

Tim Parkin (00:06:55) - Well, you hit on something really important there, which is people buy from people, not companies. And so you mentioned the buyer, the person, not the account, not the company. That's really important. We're not defining companies here. I mean, you can define that, but we need to figure out who is the person within that company that's actually going to do business with you within that two, I think the volume matters a lot, that if there are 100 potential buyers for what you're selling, then you need to take a different approach than if there were 100 million potential buyers.

Tim Parkin (00:07:22) - And so how many there are is really important. But if there are more than a certain amount, regardless, you need to prioritize and focus that you can't be all things to all people. And so when we talk about finding out who your buyer is and digging deeper here, one of the first steps is to realize you have to choose which of the buyers that are possible out there. You know, if you're selling to manufacturers, you could probably sell to a lot of them. Which one is going to be the most profitable to you? Which one is going to be the easiest to get in front of to access which ones you potentially already have inroads to? So the more you can refine and narrow down your focus on a buyer from that perspective, before you even dig deeper into who they really are, that will help cut out a lot of time and a lot of waste and a lot of effort, so you can narrow in on the ideal buyer. But then within that there's a lot of things you can look at for your buyer in terms of who they are and again, where they came from, what situation they're in and what their goals are.

Tim Parkin (00:08:17) - And more specifically, you know, we can talk about psychology, but I think one of the easiest things to identify that often can be open up floodgates for you is the trigger. I'll give you an example of a trigger. One of my clients sells wireless fences for your home so you can have your dog outside outside the yard and they can just run around. One of the biggest triggers for that is someone moving from one house to another house because the house doesn't have a yard and now they need a yard and now they're open to this. So if you can identify a trigger like that for your buyers, then that's often a really easy way to segment them to identify who they really are. And then that leads into your message of here's the reason why you should listen to me and here's how I can help you. So think about the triggers, because triggers are a really valuable way to identify and narrow down on a buyer.

Lee Murray (00:09:03) - That's unbelievably valuable because I can think of myself personally. We have a dog, and if I put myself again selling person to person in that person's shoes, I've been in that situation more times than I would like to admit.

Lee Murray (00:09:18) - My neighbors know our dog probably as well as we know our dog because the dog just keeps getting on our fence. Now it's gotten better. But you know, like when we moved five years ago, there was a series of things that were happening and that wasn't something that was on our mind until it was on our mind. So, you know, putting yourself in the buyer's shoes about what's happening in their role, you know, what are what it's going to it's going to show you the needs. It's going to show you the pain points. It's going to show you the inroads. It's going to show you how to speak to them, how not to speak to them, timing. So I love that idea of triggers and thinking about those first, because it does it opens up so many other possibilities.

Tim Parkin (00:09:57) - Yeah. And then let me expand upon that, if I may, because I think the other thing is people buy an act based on emotion and then they justify with logic. And this is really important to understand when you think about your buyer, that often we think about our features and benefits of our.

Tim Parkin (00:10:12) - Microservice what it can do. Our case studies, our results, all that stuff. And none of that actually matters. First, what matters first is the emotional investment and the belief that the buyer has. And so if you think about your buyer, you want to figure out what are their aspirations, what are the things in the future that they really want to become and to have, not necessarily the features and benefits now? And also, what are the fears that whatever pain they're experiencing, whatever problem they have, if that gets worse and in six months, in a year, in ten years, you know, what is the fear that they desperately want to avoid? You can think of it kind of like heaven and hell if you want to. What's the heaven you want to achieve? What's the hell they want to get away from? And if you frame it like that and start there, then you can uncover the emotions and emotions drive everything. And so I would start from an emotional perspective and then figure out how to address those emotions with the logical side, which is the features, the benefits, the case studies, the results, you know, all that good stuff, the reviews, you have, all of that.

Tim Parkin (00:11:12) - But start with the emotions and understanding your customers, your buyers at an emotional level.

Lee Murray (00:11:17) - I love it. Yeah. So, you know, kind of again, back to the specific B2B situation, how can if I'm going through this exercise and I'm saying, okay, I'm going to I'm going to sit down and do this and try to try to more fully understand our buyers, how can I start this process? I know you mentioned triggers, right? That's going to be a little bit of research that's involved there. Yes. Let's say I don't think I have enough time or maybe don't want to invest in more broad research. If if someone hasn't done a bunch of research, how can they quickly define characteristics of their buyer? And I can give a couple of examples to.

Tim Parkin (00:11:57) - Yeah, I think there's four steps and it's really easy. Anybody can do it and it doesn't cost a lot of money or take a lot of time. The first is to go and try to be one of these people. And so, you know, try to buy what you're selling.

Tim Parkin (00:12:09) - So this means mystery shop or competition or anybody similar because you'll figure out in that process the types of questions that you're being asked and the types of problems and frustrations you see with that process or the questions that you have. So go and do some mystery shopping, then sit down and use that and use whatever research you can do to think about your buyer. And again, their emotions and the aspirations and fears that they have and write that stuff down. It won't be perfect. It won't be right. That's not important right now. It's just important to get some structure. And then three is to go and talk to some potential customers. These can be real customers that you have. They can be potential customers. If you just email message, call people and say, Hey, we're creating something that I think could help you. I don't want to sell it to you now, but I'd love to just ask you a few questions and get some feedback and see if we're on the right track and if this makes sense.

Tim Parkin (00:12:58) - If you do that enough people will talk to you. You can also run surveys. There's a lot of ways to do this, but go and talk to the people who you actually want to talk with because they're the only ones who can give you the actual feedback that you need. And then the fourth and final step is to come back with your team, take all this stuff and put the pieces together and say, you know, we mystery shopped and here's what we saw and heard. We brainstormed and researched and here's what we found. And then we took all that and talked to real customers, real potential people. And here's what we heard from them. Now we have a really good idea of who they are, where they are, what they care about, what resonates with them, what doesn't. And now you have a really clear idea very quickly of who your buyer is.

Lee Murray (00:13:36) - Yeah, 100% agree. And I think that's the hard work that a lot of business owners, operators want to skip over, you know, and I get it.

Lee Murray (00:13:44) - You know, we're operating a company. Cash flow is always on your mind, always want new sales. But kind of like the whole thing of going back and sharpening the sword or sharpening the saw to to cut more trees. It applies here, and it's why it's important we have to go back and do the hard work, which can be harder for some people than others and ask our customers, talk to new prospects and really kind of get into the minutia of it and and be curious and ask dumb questions and totally, you know. Exactly. I love how you've outlined it like that. It's it's it's so true. And I kind of have an anecdotal story from my past, had a number of mentors over the over the years and I had one older business gentleman who just, you know, very wealthy and he kind of took him under his wing for a season and was teaching me some things as an entrepreneur. And he said he was an investor, you know, and he would invested in different companies and help angel investor and he would get people started and.

Lee Murray (00:14:42) - He said, you know, someone, a friend of mine came to me and asked me to invest in his new battery business. It's going to be kind of one of those battery plus franchise type things. But it was a different it wasn't that name. And he said, Will you invest? And he said, I'll invest, if you will, first, basically go do what you said to do. If you'll first go talk to 100% potential customers and tell them what you're doing, I'm gonna start I'm going to start this new battery company and this is what it's going to do. And I'd love for your feedback. And, you know, if we ever start one day, would you be a customer? And he got, you know, 80 to 100 yeses. And he did. He went and did all the hard work and he brought all that that data back to the investor. And the investor said, okay, you've got a business here because you tomorrow, if you open your doors, you have 80 to 100 people that will sign up and come by batteries from you.

Lee Murray (00:15:34) - And so he did. He invested and it was very successful. So I've always caught kept that with me to think it's really the fundamentals. It's really going back to the simplicity of talking to your current ideal customers, the customers that you have. We all have 1 to 10, you know, in this kind of small to midsize range where you have a lot of customers but you don't love them all. Yeah, you know, you love a handful of them. And and it's why because you don't ever talk to them. They don't ever talk to you. It's just works. They get it. You get it. So it's diving into all those conversations, like you said, and trying to figure out why does it just work? Why do they get it? Why do we get it? Why is it so symbiotic? And then looking at your other customer and saying, why does it not work with these customers? Why is it always hard to get them to pay? Why is it always hard to deliver, you know, and really building that out? I think these are the this is the hard work of it is identifying a good ideal buyer and a not so ideal buyer.

Lee Murray (00:16:29) - So you can then put processes in place to identify that in future prospects.

Tim Parkin (00:16:35) - Absolutely. And let me let me tell you something. For those of you watching this and you're not going to like this, but too bad. Listen up. You think you know your ideal buyer and you don't. And if you go and talk to them, you will be shocked. You'll say, everyone wants this thing, everyone loves this thing and you'll talk to them and no one will mention it at all. Yeah. So go and talk to them, because I've seen this time and time again, you know, we think we know our buyer. They change. People change. Culture changes. You can make assumptions, but you never know until you talk with them. So if the CEO or anybody says, We know our buyer, we know it's this person, sure, let's go talk to them and make sure there's no harm in that. You know, the worst case is we prove what we thought. But the best case is you learn that it's completely different than you thought.

Tim Parkin (00:17:20) - And now you have really valuable ammunition to use in your battle to to reach them and to to move them and change their minds. So go talk to them. You will be surprised.

Lee Murray (00:17:30) - You're 100% right. Let's shift this a little bit. And I want to I want to get your take on you know, I look at bigger companies and, you know, I've talked to a lot of marketers that enterprise level companies and they have multiple personas that they've built, multiple buyers they've identified and maybe different markets, maybe different geographies. You know, the bigger the company, obviously, the more complex it gets. But for this sort of small to midsize market, would you recommend them building out multiple buyers? You know, going through this exercise of doing it? And if so, what would that look like?

Tim Parkin (00:18:10) - Yeah. No, I wouldn't. I think that unless your budget and your team and your amount of priorities can support it, it's a trap. And I think that you can build a really big, really huge, successful company in business focusing on one buyer, do one thing and do it exceptionally well.

Tim Parkin (00:18:28) - Don't get distracted or lured by the idea that there are multiple buyers. I think often companies this is just strategically, you know, they they focus on too many things. They have too many product lines, too many categories, and they really shouldn't. If you're in that situation and you have no other option, I would keep it as minimal as possible. You know, 2 or 3 segments, 2 or 3 types of buyers. But ideally you have one single buyer. You're trying to go after it that way. Everything you do, all the marketing that you're doing can focus on that buyer can build around that buyer. That means obviously there's supporting roles in reaching that buyer. You know, they may not be your exact buyer, but there's someone who has influence in the company and you need to talk with them. I'm not discounting that, but I'm just saying that the more you can focus your resources, your time, your attention on a single buyer, the more successful, the more impact that you'll have and the more you'll discover how to navigate that, how to reach them, what those triggers are, what their hot buttons are, and all that good stuff.

Tim Parkin (00:19:27) - So as few as possible and no more.

Lee Murray (00:19:31) - Yeah, I agree. And I would say my take on that is a little more nuanced in that I think if you really do spend the time on this, you're going to you're going to determine that you could come at it from a couple of different angles. It can be service focused. Maybe your ideal clients that you have right now, our customers are with you because of the type of service that you you provide. And all these other ancillary services are really kind of getting in the way. So you need to focus on those type of buyers who love and adore and want to buy this service. Sometimes it can be an industry, it can be it can be a certain market that you're in. You know, as part of this course, I'm going to give this other analogy or parallel of how I'm building out signal media or content agency, right? So the example that I'm giving is that, you know, we do video and content creation for lots of different clients, but the one that we've really just hit it out of the park for is higher.

Lee Murray (00:20:27) - Ed And so recently what we've done is we've said, okay, we really get what they're trying to do. We can really move the needle for them. They really get how we work and we fit. So why not? Why don't we just explore working with more higher ed to see if that hypothesis is true? So that's the path we're going down now. It's not to say we're only going to be higher. Ed Now, I think in some cases some markets you can be super niche like that and it works. You don't want to always put all of your eggs in one basket. But this kind of gets to the business model of, you know, what does this look like? So if we're going after higher ed, we need to invest more time and resources into finding more colleges and universities to shoot video for. But I can't take my focus completely off of other service based businesses or, you know, local businesses that are not higher ed that need that service as well and that are finding me so Right.

Lee Murray (00:21:26) - I think it's it's it's sort of a it's sort of a tricky thing that you have to investigate because it's not about saying we're going to serve multiple markets. I think you can get into trouble there because smaller companies, they only have so many resources. The bigger companies, they can dedicate a whole department to serving a market and fail and still be in business. Exactly. You know, somehow but for our small, small to mid-size, we have to really dive in and see, okay, you know, where are we winning? And, you know, another nuance to it, I would say, is I like to in another part, the second part of this course, we'll get deeper into this, but stakeholders. So if you say our buyer is the facilities manager at co packing, you know, small co packing in the southeast. Well who are the stakeholders to that that buyer? There are influencers internally in the company that help to make the decision. They influence the decision. Those could sort of become multiple like your your multiple buyer setup, but they're all influencing that same sale.

Lee Murray (00:22:35) - So then it allows you to to to take a deeper approach. But you're still you're not spreading yourself broadly. You're still going deep.

Tim Parkin (00:22:43) - Exactly. Yes. That's very important, especially in the B2B side.

Lee Murray (00:22:48) - All right. So now let's say we've we've spent the time doing this and, you know, we're going to kind of maybe little bonus footage. I don't know what we'll call it, but, you know, looking forward. We've got everything in place and we've we've kind of stopped what we're doing to think about it and talk to people when we've done that hard work. Now we're going to start putting our plan in place and, you know, moving things forward and putting campaigns together and doing all the things that we should do as marketers and salespeople. How first of all, how often should they revisit this document, the things that they've documented down, as you've said, how often should they look at that with their team? Let's start there.

Tim Parkin (00:23:27) - Yeah, I would recommend at least every quarter, every three months looking at it.

Tim Parkin (00:23:32) - And that doesn't mean you need to change it. And I would encourage you not to change it. But every quarter you should be reflecting on it, at least one to remind your team, Here's who our ideal buyer is, here's who we're going after. And in that reminding process, look at where are we deviating from this focus? Where have we stepped into territory we shouldn't? Where have we been communicating to people that we shouldn't? How is our message become more broad than than specific? So use that reminder to refresh, especially if you've added new people to the company to remind them, Here's who are ideal buyers, here's who we're going after. And then the second is to add to it or change it if you've seen evidence that you should do so. As you mentioned, where are we winning? I think it's a great question to ask at that point and say where are we winning and should we refine this? Should we change it should be shifted? Should we double down? Should we expand it? But also throughout the quarter, customer service, you know, your sales team, anybody in the organization will have observations and thoughts about the ideal buyer encounters with them, observations, things they've heard or seen.

Tim Parkin (00:24:38) - Use those and get those from the team and update improve this document to reflect that. That if you've heard something consistently a pattern over time, take that into account and make that manifest in a document so that you can continue to evolve and improve and refine your vision of your ideal buyer. And by doing so, it'll go from this generic blurry vision to a crystal clear, laser focused ideal buyer that everybody could repeat and recite and throw a dart at the board and hit a bull's eye every time of this is a person we're going after, we all know it and we're all taking the right steps to get there.

Lee Murray (00:25:15) - Yep, that's right. Yeah. And a document can get stale because things change so quickly. I guess I would just add to that, I like to think about things like an experiment, almost a scientific, you know, it's a hypothesis. You're. You're creating a document that is hypothesis. It it is an educated guess. It's not a complete guess because you've got answers from your buyers and your your customers.

Lee Murray (00:25:39) - So you're on the right track and you're probably going to be pretty close and you'll probably get some good wins out of it, too, right? Right away, because things will be uncovered. But as time goes on, it's not going to stay stagnant. Those answers are going to change. The market's going to change. Your services are going to everything changes. So as things move along, I like the quarter. The looking at things on a high level every quarter at least. I think that's a good rhythm to get in. I think if you have a marketing director or a marketing VP or even a marketing manager, having them have access to that document and and checking in and holding them accountable to checking in with that document, you know, keeping that document really close to the campaigns that you're, you're you're running is, you know, is, I think, very helpful. And then as we move forward, you know. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Tim Parkin (00:26:31) - Oh, no. It's agreeing with you.

Tim Parkin (00:26:32) - Absolutely.

Lee Murray (00:26:33) - Yeah. So as we're moving forward, you're putting all your stuff in place. The next question is how can they constantly be learning about who their buyer is becoming?

Tim Parkin (00:26:43) - Hmm.

Lee Murray (00:26:44) - Right. Yeah, it's it's.

Tim Parkin (00:26:45) - A good question. How do you hit a moving target? The Wayne Gretzky quote applies here that, you know, you skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is. And I think that that's so important, especially in today's environment where things are changing even faster than before. And with AI, they're going to accelerate even more and buyers and people are changing so quickly as well. So I think if you want to stay on top of where your buyers are at and where they're headed, you know, the best way to do that is to be in constant conversation with them. This goes back to what I said before, but not only in the beginning. Talk to them to find out who they are, what interests them, what motivates them, what the triggers are, but keep in touch with them.

Tim Parkin (00:27:26) - And this is again from customer support, from sales, even marketing. Everybody should be talking to the customer as much as possible. I call it customer proximity. Whoever's closest to the customer wins. And if you can stay close to the customer, you have a huge competitive advantage because you get wind of these things of what they're thinking, how they're changing at the moment of inception rather than six months down the line when now you're behind the curve. So this means hang out with your buyers, you know, put on an event and invite them spend. Time with them, take them out to dinner and to coffee, call them on the phone, you know, stay involved and engage with them. On the marketing side, if you can create a community and get your people there, start a podcast like this one and get people to listen to it. Anything you can do to keep people engaged with you and to keep that conversation two way open is going to help you keep tabs on what they're thinking, how they're feeling, and where they see things are changing.

Lee Murray (00:28:26) - Yeah, I like the podcast thing, obviously, because I have one, but I'm a marketer. I support these type of things. You know, I think that's one of the more modern ideas for not only creating a lot of content for awareness and things as it scales, but you can easily just invite your prospects on and talk about things that are, you know, near and dear to their heart. And you learn as you're talking to them about the things that you're wanting to offer them and how they're buying. So I like that a lot. You know, the way I think about it is especially B2B, we go so long in between. Seeing the proximity is not there historically, classically, right? It's events. It's that once a year conference, it's, you know, those type of things. It's emails. It's it's not there's not it's not personalized on a day to day, week to week, month to month. And I think that with the onset of digital, it's really changed things.

Lee Murray (00:29:23) - It changed us, the nature of how we interact. And now with social media, you know, we're given the opportunity if we want to take it, to be in contact with at a granular level, all of our buyers and partners and customers in the comment section on LinkedIn and the comment section on Instagram and the DM, you know of each of these platforms and all of those comments are justifying your hypothesis. They're, they're reaffirming what you're doing or they're changing it. And it's also creating content at the same time that you can use in your marketing efforts to say, Hey, look, we listened and we are re saying what you said to us that shows that we we care about you, right? Totally. So digital platforms have given us the ability as marketers to grow in a way that we have never had access to. So we have to really change our thinking about instead of it being this once a year annual conference, which those are great. And there's tons of great things that can come from those.

Lee Murray (00:30:26) - You know, you get the political update, you get the industry update, you get all the kind of high level things that aren't really going to help you sell accounts, right? You can build relationships, but you can do a lot of relationship building in between.

Tim Parkin (00:30:42) - Absolutely. Well, I think you're spot on there. And really, it's about relationships, right? That's that's what you're hitting on here. And I think in B2B, we often think about accounts and companies rather than people, as we said. But if you can build and maintain and grow relationships, you win mean period, full stop. And I think that one of the things right now, especially that I've seen that you've seen I know is LinkedIn, that if you're in B2B and you're not on LinkedIn, you know, the only excuse I can possibly think of is that you're in a strange market where your customers, your buyers aren't there. But outside of that you must be on LinkedIn because it's the best way professionally to stay on top of people and build these relationships and deepen those.

Tim Parkin (00:31:24) - And it's not just about posting on social media and liking some people's comments. It's about, you know, really caring, really engaging with people and even, dare I say, have a CRM and and, you know, track the updates there and keep tabs on people. But it's about relationships. It's about people. And I don't care how you do it, but do it and stay connected to your buyers. Even past buyers, even current clients, you know, even people who were buyers but didn't pan out, you know, deals that didn't get one doesn't matter. Just stay in touch with people and build relationships. And if you do that, you know, that's 90% of it.

Lee Murray (00:31:58) - Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I would just say as a nuance to that is if you're in the white collar kind of professional sales role or buying selling role, then LinkedIn is a great place because your buyer is typically going to is going to engage on LinkedIn to some degree. It may be a really small degree, but they're they're updating their profile, they're looking at notifications.

Lee Murray (00:32:20) - They're, you know, sort of seeing what's going on in the blue collar world. You know, how you get a job and how you apply for jobs is a little different. You may not utilize LinkedIn. You may be utilizing indeed or monster or, you know, local recruiter or something job fair. And so if your buyer, if you identify your buyer as blue collar because I mean I had a client that was chemical manufacturing small company and they're selling their buyer who's, you know, you you drive up into their bay and they're going to buy your goods and try them. And repeat buy is the goal that buyer was a blue collar buyer. They were not a white collar. It wasn't a white collar position. So to reach them on LinkedIn would be really difficult. But what we found is the same principle applies. It's all about building the relationship, as you said. So we just had to meet them in a different space. We knew that in between, you know, definitely lunch break, but in between customers, they're on TikTok because that's where they are today, you know, and not that you're trying to change their behavior and say you should or shouldn't do this or that.

Lee Murray (00:33:28) - What you're trying to do is meet them where they are and add value to their role. So, you know, you have to get a little bit more creative if you are if you're used to making content for LinkedIn and engaging there, it's you got to you got to put that creative hat on or bring someone in to help you think creatively about reaching that buyer on TikTok. And there's ways to do it. There's ways to connect all the dots for them that really establish your brand in front of them as. Part of their world. Yes. So.

Tim Parkin (00:33:58) - Yeah, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or an email list or LinkedIn, you're right. Find where they are, find what they're paying attention to, and then get in front of them and stay in front of them. And in a way that's not pitchy and salesy, that's caring and loving and friendly and helpful. And that's all it is.

Lee Murray (00:34:20) - That's right. Yeah. And I would just say to kind of bring it all full circle, you know, what you said earlier about going and talking to your customers? I've found that.

Lee Murray (00:34:30) - It's amazing the the results you get from just that simple task is just sitting down with your customer and asking some questions that have been on your mind. They don't know that you have those questions on your mind. They're doing their own thing. They're operating their business. They're being, you know, in their world. But if you come into their world and ask them about. A nuance of how their role operates. So whenever you buy these chemicals, where do they go? Where do you put them? Do you put them on the shelf? Do you how quickly do you use them? You know, how how long have you been using these type of chemicals? And you start getting into their world of how they think. You realize like, oh, wow, the pain point I was really trying to solve for, they were sort of buying it because it was sort of scratching the real pain point. But I've now determined what the real thing is. Yes. And that is that they have to buy ahead a certain amount and hide it in this closet because of the, you know, the boss or whatever.

Lee Murray (00:35:30) - Like there's this internal world that's happening that you don't you're not privy to. Right. And just having those conversations, it opens all this dialogue up and it allows you to really identify what that world looks like and how then you can engage in a meaningful way, you know, and instead of it just being canned and surface and yes, you know, we're going to send an email because that's what we were told to do, some marketing, you know, Course told us to send an email and so we're going to send a email. It didn't work, you know.

Tim Parkin (00:36:03) - Yeah. Now what? Yeah, Now we have to actually talk to our buyers. Oh that's right. Oh that's right. Just do it now and save yourself a ton of time and a ton of stress.

Lee Murray (00:36:12) - That's right. Yeah. So I think if you could have the, the gold, the gold here is to find a way that you can be candid with your buyer, understand what's happening in their world and in the process, create content from it that you can then put in front of that buyer and scaled to many other buyers that have the same problem that you've now identified.

Lee Murray (00:36:36) - Because now what that's doing is you're learning, you're getting better how to approach them and they're helping you market to other people. That's that's really the it's not easy to do. I think that would probably be level 2 or 3 as you get down this road. But as you're constantly iterating to answer this, this last question here, you're constantly iterating. It's staying, as you said, in proximity to the buyer, staying close to them, always asking them about what's happening in their world. So you can create content that adds value so you can show up and add value, so you can build the relationship and add value. These are the these are the things that we have to do, which is the hard work of understanding our buyer.

Tim Parkin (00:37:17) - Yes. And it is so important and so vital and that if you don't do it, I can almost guarantee you'll fail or you'll waste a lot of time in getting there. And it sounds like boring, difficult, scary work. Yes. But really, once you get started, it is the most invigorating and exciting work to do and it's something you're going to have to keep doing.

Tim Parkin (00:37:41) - So it's not just, you know, I don't want to do it or I'll do it once and stop. But let me just give some reassurance to the people watching this, because I think that it can seem intimidating. And imagine in your job if someone were to contact you and say, I want to help you be successful in your job. I want to solve a major problem for you for free. I don't want to sell you anything. I just want to learn what the problem is so I can help build a perfect solution for you. A lot of people, myself especially, would be like, sure, let me let me give you my laundry list of things I'm dealing with right now that I'd love to have help with. And if you can fix any one of them, that's great. And if you can't, no worries. Leave me alone. So you're going to get rejected for sure. But a lot of people need help. They need your help. They need the solution that you provide.

Tim Parkin (00:38:26) - And until you go and talk to them, they can't give you what you need to help them. So just think about it from that perspective that, you know, people are not adverse to this type of request. This is a normal thing. I've done it with my ideal buyers, with my clients, with past clients, and people are really happy to talk to you and to just event and share their problems and their pains and their frustrations and their feelings, especially if you can reassure them and give them some guidance and encourage them that you might be able to help in the future. Maybe now, maybe not. But you have something you're working on that might be valuable to them. So go and do it. There's no excuse. Stop waiting. Make it to today, the day that you decide we're going to go actually talk to our buyers.

Lee Murray (00:39:09) - That's right. Cue the outro. Music. Love it. All right. Thanks a lot, Tim. This has been amazing, as I knew it would be.

Lee Murray (00:39:16) - And thank you so much for coming back on. Thanks for for this this series that we're doing. And I know they're going to get so much value from this. So thanks a lot. I love.

Tim Parkin (00:39:25) - It. So excited.

Lee Murray (00:39:27) - Hey, thanks again for tuning in. I hope you're getting value out of this. If you didn't know. We have an email newsletter that follows this podcast exploring growth newsletter. If you go to Harvard Murray and you click on podcast at the top, you'll see a little submission box there. About quarter of the way down. You can sign up for the email every week. I. Literally sit down and write my thoughts of what's going through my head at the moment. You know, things that I'm dealing with with clients, you know, concepts that I'm learning or deployed that have worked. I talk about everything that marketing, sales, customer success, everything in between. So if that's something that you're interested in reading or subscribing to. Definitely go there and check that out.