How to Grow Your Business Faster – In Just 7 Minutes with Laura Patterson

Resources/Links:

• Fast track your business. Click here: http://visionedgemarketing.com/

Summary

Is it a challenge for you to connect marketing activities with real business outcomes? In a business landscape, random acts of marketing are wasted resources; finding a strategic approach is crucial.

Laura Patterson is the #1 Amazon Best-Selling author of Fast-Track Your Business: A Customer-Centric Approach to Accelerate Market Growth.

In this episode, Laura shares valuable insights on effective B2B marketing strategies. She emphasizes the importance of avoiding random acts of marketing and stresses the need for a strategic, customer-centric approach highlighting the significance of balancing customer value with business value for sustainable growth.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:14 – Laura’s ideal client: We have served B2B customers and they want to be able to be very smart about how they grow organically.
• 02:12 – The problem she helps solve: We help them avoid what we call random acts.
• 03:35 – Symptoms to her client’s problems: They have trouble telling their story because they have not done a good job of really thinking about their value proposition, positioning, messaging and how to differentiate themselves.
• 05:10 – Mistake clients make before meeting Laura: Not having a strategy at all.
• 07:00 – Laura’s Valuable Free Action [VFA]: The secret to doing that [link investments and activities to business results] well is to have what we call logic or metrics chains.
• 07:38 – Her Valuable Free Resource [VFR]: Check out this white paper and download for Free, ‘Bring Your A-Game to a Customer Empowered Market.’ Click here: https://visionedgemarketing.com/bring-your-customer-centric-a-game/
• 08:40 – Q: If you could give us one piece of advice to the C-Suite or the board of directors, what would it be? A: Be vigilant about maintaining the balance between creating customer value and creating business value.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“It's one thing to have a strategy but if you don't have the processes in place to execute, that can be a problem.” -Laura Patterson Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Welcome everyone to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. I’m Tom Poland, beaming out to you from the sunny Sunshine Coast here in Australia. We’re joined today by Laura Patterson. Laura, very warm welcome from down under. Where are you based?

Laura Patterson 00:22
I’m in very sunny Austin, Texas.

Tom Poland 00:25
Oh, Austin. Love Austin. Keep Austin weird.

Laura Patterson 00:28
Yeah, exactly.

Tom Poland 00:30
The intellectual capital of the USA. The New Yorkers might argue that it is just this wonderfully innovative, buzzing city. Laura is a number one Amazon bestselling author of the book, Fast Track Your Business: Customer Centric Approach to Accelerate Market Growth. And this book, this is a paradigm shift. This is a way of looking at growing your business that’s not internally focused, it’s externally focused. You start with the customer base. It’s something that I’m guilty of missing constantly in my marketing. So I’m looking forward to hearing your insights, Laura. Title folks is very simple, very benefit-rich, How to Grow Your Business Faster. Laura, our time is going to start now. Question number one is, who is your ideal client?

Laura Patterson 01:14
So Tom, thank you for having me and I’m really excited to be here. So since 1999, which is when we founded Vision Edge Marketing, we have served B2B customers and they are unique in that they want to be able to be very smart about how they grow organically. So smart is an important part of their ingredients. And typically these customers have, they are facing customers of their own that have multiple people in the buying decision. It’s a considered sale, it’s a long sales cycle. There’s some complexity to the product. So that’s a kind of typical customer for us.

Tom Poland 01:54
Very interesting. It’s business to business. There’s multiple decision makers. This is a difficult sale. I mean this, you’ve got, it’s not just sitting down with one person over coffee and they go, yes or no. So, well, I’m sure we’re going to unpack that. Tell us to start the unpacking process. Tell us a bit more about the problem you solve.

Laura Patterson 02:12
We help them avoid what we call random acts. And we’re all guilty of it. Even we sometimes are guilty of it. Whether it’s random acts of selling, random acts of marketing, random acts of strategy, random acts of process. Companies do a lot of random acts and we help them avoid doing that because random acts are very expensive. And so most of our customers are cost-conscious. They want to be able to deliver, but they have to make money doing it. And so that’s important to them.

Tom Poland 02:45
And so you’re talking about the sort of knee-jerk reaction stuff. Oh gosh, we don’t have enough clients. Let’s go to a trade show. Or let’s go to a conference or whatever.

Laura Patterson 02:52
Let’s do a social media campaign, right? Let’s do a new email campaign, right? Let’s run a podcast series.

Tom Poland 02:59
But they haven’t sat down yet and thought about this strategically. What’s repeatable, what’s the marketing message? Et cetera, et cetera. So it’s that whole thing of putting the tactics before the strategy. So, and I suppose that, a bit like, I mean I used to call it being a pinball in the pinball machine.you just feel like you’re bouncing around with all these different ideas. You’ve probably given us a part of the answer to the next question. Question three is, what are the typical symptoms that your clients are experiencing before engaging with you? And one of them is obviously these knee-jerk, these random acts you’re talking about. What else is happening in their business that they could look at? And they go, okay, we need to find out more about Laura’s work.

Laura Patterson 03:35
They have trouble telling their story because they have not done a good job of really thinking about their value proposition, their positioning, messaging and how to differentiate themselves. As a result, they get low customer engagement and they have a challenge with customer acquisition, customer retention rates. And all of them have one thing in common. They really struggle to link investments and activities to business results.

Tom Poland 04:00
The link, say that again please.

Laura Patterson 04:03
To link investments and activities to business results. They can do a lot of things and they can measure these things, right? But they can’t tell the leadership team how those things link back to a business result.

Tom Poland 04:17
Right, so, they don’t know what actually worked, why it worked and what their ROI, return investment was. And we are talking about anyone that’s involved in random acts. I mean, and a lot of these people don’t know how to do this stuff. And that’s where you come in and you also, even if you think you know how to do this, you just need someone outside your own head to ask the questions and to guide and mold the responses. And that’s where people like Laura come in. That’s why her services can be so extraordinarily invaluable. So we are talking about organizations that are proactive and they know they need to be marketing and are out there. So there’s a lot of boxes being ticked here, that said they’re going to make mistakes. One of them is obviously putting the tactics before the strategy. And you just mentioned another one, not linking the activity to results, they were doing investment. What other mistakes have you seen folks make before they reach out to you?

Laura Patterson 05:10
Well, not having a strategy at all. That’s one. A lot of them also are, and you made this point right at the very beginning, Tom, they’re internally oriented instead of externally oriented. So they don’t have any customer centric sort of measurable focus. They have poor processes. That’s a big thing. It’s one thing to have a strategy but if you don’t have the processes in place to execute, that can be a problem. Poor choices in performance measures. And that’s a huge conversation we should say for another time. And then last, which is back to our point about being smart about the way to grow is they don’t really know how to use their data well, right? They have a lot of data but they don’t know how to use it.

Tom Poland 05:50
Folks, I just want to underline all of this and I know I’m interviewing Laura here and she’s not interviewing me. But I just wanted to add to that, that you’re just listening to the voice of experience when we are listening to Laura, you’re listening to someone who thinks things through carefully. And I know just even from before we started this interview, Laura, the questions you are asking me, to iron out any potential wrinkles while in advance. So you look ahead, you’re seeing what the issues might be, you’re formulating questions to resolve those issues ahead of time. And so I’m saying this folks because I interview a lot of people, but it’s pretty rare I interview someone like Laura who has really articulated the issues and delivered conceptually and in principle at least the solutions as succinctly as you have, Laura. Folks, I’m interviewing Laura because I think she’s really good at what she does. I’m not getting any affiliate commission or anything like this. This is just someone you should be speaking to if you fit the description that Laura’s just articulated, let’s flip it from mistakes and how terrible these people are. We know they’re not, they just need a hand to something that they can do. Top tip, question five, what’s one thing that someone can do? It’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it might take them a step in the right direction.

Laura Patterson 07:00
One of the things they can do is back to that linkage. The tool to do that, the secret to doing that well is to have what we call logic or metrics chains. And if you go onto our website at visionedgemarketing.com and you type in logic chains or metrics chains, things will come up and will tell you how to do them. It is the secret sauce. And that is something everybody should be thinking about whenever they create a plan. Whether it’s a sales plan, a marketing plan, any plan.

Tom Poland 07:26
So it’s visionedgemarketing.com. And what are they searching for here with, for the linkage?

Laura Patterson 07:31
Just type in the search metrics chain or logic chains, data chains. Yeah, we talk about that a lot.

Tom Poland 07:38
Cool advice. And there folks, that’s at the top of the page, thank you for that. Question six, valuable free resource, but we probably would’ve given them that. But folks, you can go to http://visionedgemarketing.com/, what else is there they can search for? Because there’s quite a lot on there. I can see that there’s free resources,

Laura Patterson 07:52
Hundreds of things are on there. All of them are free. But one thing we recommend for any company that is focused on being customer centric is check out our white paper. It’s free to download, Bring your A-Game to a Customer Empowered Market. And there’s an infographic in there and we’ll help you with thinking about some of your measures.

Tom Poland 08:11
So folks, again, if you go to http://visionedgemarketing.com/, go to the search button at the top and just type in customer centric marketing. You’re going to find that white paper. And I’ve already had a look at it and it’s really interesting.

Laura Patterson 08:23
Type in customer DNA and it’ll come up.

Tom Poland 08:26
Customer DNA, thank you, and come up. So http://visionedgemarketing.com/, search button, top of the homepage, customer DNA. Last question, Laura, and I’ve gone over time, but that’s my bad not yours. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

Laura Patterson 08:40
So one of the things that we get asked a lot, if you could give us one piece of advice to the C-Suite or the board of directors, what would it be? And I will say, be vigilant about maintaining the balance between creating customer value and creating business value. And if you have to put your thumb on the scale, put the thumb on the side of creating customer value.

Tom Poland 09:05
Right, brilliant. That’s such good advice. That’s really worth pondering. Laura Patterson, thanks so much for your insight and sharing your experience with us.

Laura Patterson 09:12
My pleasure. Thank you Tom.

Tom Poland 09:14
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.