Is Your Business Stuck? The High-Stakes Decision Every CEO Must Make [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 71]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

Brian Casey
0:00:00
Alex, big conversation today around they ask you answer and when to hire a coach and when it makes sense to do it in a DIY fashion. And there's one big factor that's going to help you to determine which of those two is the right

Alex Winter
0:00:13
fit for you. And that is. Welcome back to Endless Customers, the show that teaches you how to earn trust and win more business in the age of AI. I'm your host, Alex Winter, and today we are joined by Brian Casey. He's a lead coach and trainer here at Impact. Brian, welcome back to the show.

Brian Casey
0:00:36
Glad to be back, Alex.

Alex Winter
0:00:37
Glad to have you, man. We have a great topic today. Today we are talking about something that I think a lot of business owners and a lot of people may have questions around, and it's really should we do it ourselves or should we hire a coach or a trainer or somebody to come in and help us do the thing, right?

Alex Winter
0:00:51
So a good place to start or I guess the question to start things off that I have for you is like, are there universal signals or is there like a, how can you tell as a business owner which way you should go? Like can I do this myself or do I need help?

Alex Winter
0:01:04
That's the big question. I know it's a loaded question, but where does a business owner start when they're contemplating this question?

Brian Casey
0:01:11
Yeah, there's a lot of factors to consider. Ultimately, one of the universal truths about the ask you answer that I don't know if we like to talk about is it's a very easy to understand principle and philosophy. That's true. It is. Yeah. But ultimately, like it's the difference between understanding an application

Brian Casey
0:01:29
that is generally where the whole conversation around could we do this internally? Do we have to have some type of an external assistance? And ultimately, there's a lot of people that end up doing it in a DIY fashion for a while and then come to us later. And the things that they're not lacking, but the things that are struggling with are to see results and to really understand like which plays to run in which order. So

Brian Casey
0:02:00
if we were to say like, what are some universal signals that a business might be a better fit for one? If some businesses are already operating in EOS or scaling up, and they already have a framework to manage change implementation, that might be a business that might stand a better chance to be able to do it in a DIY fashion because they already have daily meetings, they already have likely, you know, weekly L10s.

Alex Winter
0:02:32
Right, that structure, the structure's there, so they already kind of have that discipline or some of that recurring accountability in place.

Brian Casey
0:02:39
Right, they have opportunities to talk about the things that they need to be talking about with sales and marketing teams. Yeah. Other than that, like universally, I don't know if there's a ton of signals to say

Brian Casey
0:02:55
you're an absolute great fit to do it in DIY fashion, or you're a great fit to do it in a coaching environment. It's really about like the confidence level in how well you can execute the right plays at the right moment. You see it all the time with NFL coaches

Brian Casey
0:03:10
where they go from being a offensive coordinator, and then now they're having to think about, you know, the defensive side of the ball, they're having to think about the play clock, they're having to think about time management. It's like all of those things are important

Brian Casey
0:03:23
to be able to win a game, and it's just a lot of things to focus on, a lot of things that you gotta get right in the right order to see success.

Alex Winter
0:03:31
Yeah, that's so true. I'm a Patriots fan, because I'm from Massachusetts, and that's what we're struggling with right now. Our head coach, Gerard Mayo, he's an incredible, he played defense, he's a very creative defensive coordinator, but as head coach,

Alex Winter
0:03:46
some of those problems you can see happening and my team's not doing so good this season. But I'm hoping we'll get back on the right track. But so next question for you here, I definitely think that trying to figure out DIY or having a coach or how you wanna implement this

Alex Winter
0:03:59
is important, but I think too for business owners, it always comes down to the bottom line, it comes down to budget, right? So how does budget factor, and I'm guessing if you don't have a lot of budget, you're gonna start with a DIY thing,

Alex Winter
0:04:09
just because that's just where you are, your journey at that point, but like, where do you start to see like, man, we really need to make this investment? There is ROI in having a coach and having a trainer to help us really implement this the right way

Alex Winter
0:04:22
to get traction faster.

Brian Casey
0:04:24
The whole conversation about budget, DIY versus doing a coaching program, I think the factor that doesn't get discussed a lot is in order to do the asking answer, independent of whether it's in a coaching and training environment or DIY, is there's going to be a people investment. There has to be a time allocation or a new person brought in to own the content creation efforts. And maybe we're not too far away from living in a world where the written content manager can also do video.

Brian Casey
0:04:48
Generally, they've been two separate roles. But I think the bigger question when it comes to budget is if you're going to invest in those people, how do you make sure that you have the you find the right people, that they're doing the right work, so that you capitalize on the salaries that you're paying? And so it's kind of like you're gonna have an investment either way,

Brian Casey
0:05:16
and there's gonna be a people investment either way. Do you double down in a sense to make sure that that person is set up best for success, which is the path that does cost more money because that's the training path? Or do you say like, no, we actually feel like

Brian Casey
0:05:33
we have the right structure in place and this person is going to be set up for success because of the type of person they are. And there are some companies out there that they nail the hire so they get the right content manager in place. They have the right marketing and sales leadership to facilitate that person to be successful.

Brian Casey
0:05:56
And that might be a company that can do it in a DIY fashion. Like if you have someone who comes from an agency background and they understand a lot of the components that we'll eventually talk about in a training and coaching program, maybe they could. It's ultimately the question any time we talk about budget, in my mind, comes back to, you're going to make an investment either way on the people's side.

Brian Casey
0:06:26
How confident do you feel that you're going to be able to make the right choice in terms of bringing in the right people? Because that's a big budget thing. If you have to bring in someone, they're not the right fit, you have to find someone three to six months later.

Brian Casey
0:06:38
But if you have a ton of history hiring,

Brian Casey
0:06:40
marketing support, and content creators, then maybe you feel more comfortable and confident doing that. Yeah, that makes so much sense.

Alex Winter
0:06:47
I like what you're saying about finding the right person, because there has been instances where you get that right person, the content manager comes in and they just crush it and they can take the ball and run with it. But we all know the cost of hiring if you make the wrong hire and you don't get the right person, and how much time and money and effort that takes to get you back on track. So for people that are doing DIY, I guess my question is, where do you find that balance

Alex Winter
0:07:11
of like getting it right and making the investment versus making the mistakes and it ends up costing you way more and way more time and it just ends up being a negative thing. Because I would imagine that if it doesn't work, if it was my company, I'd be frustrated.

Alex Winter
0:07:25
And then I'd almost start to be worried that I'm going, oh, they asked me this, it doesn't work, because it didn't work for me. But that's not necessarily true. So I mean, I know you interface with a lot of clients. Has this happened?

Alex Winter
0:07:36
And what does that look like as people go on this journey?

Brian Casey
0:07:39
Yeah, so I think there's a, the interesting thing relative to they ask, you answer is a lot of people do hinge their believability on it based on how well they can execute it. If we think about the core root principles of an endless customers, they ask you to answer environment.

Brian Casey
0:08:02
It's people want knowledge, buyers are more educated than they've ever been, buyers want to be more educated than they've ever been, and our job is to educate them and facilitate them to make an educated buying decision and knowing that if we educate them and they buy somewhere else, that if we've done our job,

Brian Casey
0:08:23
that was actually the right decision for them and we have to be okay living with that. I don't think fundamentally any business owner would disagree that that's how we as businesses have to market and sell in 2024 and beyond. So the principles are universal. The principles are true, right? It really comes down to like how well can you change your organization and the

Brian Casey
0:08:44
content you're creating, how you're leveraging content, to capitalize on what we know is true about the modern buyer. And that's where it's tough, is if you don't run the right place,

Brian Casey
0:08:59
if you don't get the right person to manage your content creation efforts, you're gonna lose faith. You're gonna say like, that they ask, you answer thing was a fad, or it's not really the right,

Brian Casey
0:09:11
it doesn't work for our environment. It doesn't work for us in our unique situation. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I see in companies that do a DIY effort is they'll come to us and they say, hey, we've got a little bit of success, we're really struggling to get traction in these areas.

Brian Casey
0:09:30
We really believe it. This is how we want our business to be based. Help us. But there's a lot of companies that we talked to at one point that probably go the DIY around and we never hear from again because they're just like,

Brian Casey
0:09:46
that wasn't it.

Alex Winter
0:09:48
Sure, sure, and if it doesn't work, then they're going to the next thing to try to find another solution. Have you heard of stories where people do the DIY thing and it works and they don't need coaching and training and they just like, they pulled like,

Alex Winter
0:10:00
I'm thinking about Marcus Sheridan, the founder and writer of They Ask, You Answer. I mean, he started out doing it himself, staying up late night writing blogs. Obviously, as a CEO, there's a lot of balance that you have to find to make that work correctly,

Alex Winter
0:10:11
and scalability-wise, over time, you have to think longer term because it's not gonna be sustainable, but Marcus did it himself, so I'm sure there's other companies that have done that. Have you seen people do that, and what does that look like?

Brian Casey
0:10:23
Yeah, there's a company, Bridge Coffee, based in the UK. They came through our sales pipeline. We had conversations with them. Certainly they could have elevated themselves to certain components, but they came to us as a pretty mature, they ask, you answer company.

Brian Casey
0:10:39
They had a videographer. They were getting pretty good traction. They had an updated website they did themselves. They had a strategic thinker that was managing a lot of their content creation efforts, and they were seeing success.

Brian Casey
0:10:53
So it is possible.

Alex Winter
0:10:54
It's definitely possible.

Brian Casey
0:10:55
It's really about like making sure that you get the right person that has the right build and makeup to be able to own it. Yeah. Be the champion within that organization to really own it.

Alex Winter
0:11:05
That's a good point.

Alex Winter
0:11:05
What do we think about or like what do we say to people that are maybe entertaining the DIY approach, What do we say to people that are maybe entertaining the DIY approach, but they also want to go fast? Because I feel like doing it yourself, there's a learning curve, obviously,

Alex Winter
0:11:20
so it might take longer, I guess in theory, than if you hire somebody to come in and really hold you accountable and like, flash a bang is a lot faster that way. Is that true? Am I saying that right?

Alex Winter
0:11:31
And if so, can we just talk about that a little bit?

Brian Casey
0:11:34
Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things in a coaching and training environment is speed. And oftentimes businesses will come to us and we'll be talking about a two year plan. And there's a two year revenue plan. Ultimately if we think about the business

Brian Casey
0:11:47
and we start to backtrack, well we have a six month sales cycle and our close rate is 30% let's say. It's like, then you have to make traction the next 12 months to be able to hit your revenue goal for next year.

Brian Casey
0:12:02
Right.

Brian Casey
0:12:02
Which is intense.

Alex Winter
0:12:03
That's like, oh, okay, we got our work cut out for us this time.

Brian Casey
0:12:07
Yeah.

Brian Casey
0:12:08
And the other thing that they ask and answer is, it is not a pay-to-play game. It's not a flip that you switch and you immediately start just getting these great qualified leads and a ton of traffic to your site. It doesn't happen like that.

Brian Casey
0:12:22
This is the diet and exercise of the marketing world.

Alex Winter
0:12:26
Yeah, I love that analogy, that's great.

Brian Casey
0:12:28
You have to do the right things and build the right habits to be able to see sustainable success. This isn't a diet pill. Right.

Alex Winter
0:12:35
We also know what happens with diet pills. You know, you might lose the weight real quick and you feel great and then as soon as you stop taking the pills, guess what happens? The old beer gut comes back. And I'm speaking from experience when I say that.

Alex Winter
0:12:46
So, that's a good one. And there's some times where like,

Brian Casey
0:12:49
that is a great play for you, right? If you need an injection of revenue and you're willing to spend, paid spend on it, like, and that helps you get the results and there's a positive ROI, great.

Alex Winter
0:13:01
Right.

Brian Casey
0:13:03
And it's not sustainable to only have that for 90% of businesses out there where you can have something that you're building that's foundational in the back end. So that's kind of one of the big things that's like, what kind of results are we talking about?

Brian Casey
0:13:20
When do you as a business need to see them? How important is it to you as a business to hit those goals? Generally, we're talking about revenue goals that are attached to qualified lead goals. And if there's a, as soon as you start to think about your sales cycle, your close rate, your revenue goals,

Brian Casey
0:13:38
you're gonna get some clarity in terms of like what type of results you need to see by when as leading indicators, which can be very helpful in making a decision of like, do we have runway to try to figure this out on our own and get there in a not straight line path,

Brian Casey
0:13:54
or do we need to be as straight line as possible?

Alex Winter
0:13:56
Yeah, that's a good point. We always talk here internally about leading and lagging indicators and how to set those up so that you really have these key indicators to make better decisions and know if something's working or not, and if it's not, that's okay,

Alex Winter
0:14:09
because it lets you know that you need to make a change. So with that, if a business is trying to evaluate whether they should go with a coach or whether they should do DIY, maybe they've been doing DIY for a little bit, it's not working, what does that look like?

Alex Winter
0:14:24
Are there red flags or what helps influence those decisions as far as when they should make a change?

Brian Casey
0:14:29
So the thing with bringing in a coach, because coaches generally are gonna come with a team of people to work with, is you need to have time allocated to meet with that coach. You need to have people and time allocation to accomplish the things that the coach

Brian Casey
0:14:46
is gonna coach you to do, and your organization has to be ready for change. Right, so that's one thing, if you're doing it in a DIY sense, you can kind of back burner this stuff, and nobody's gonna say, hey, why didn't we do this?

Brian Casey
0:15:01
Because it's not your top priority. Yeah, yeah. And ultimately, like a lot of people that come and work with us, this isn't, as a business, their number one priority. It's helpful, it is the number one sales and marketing

Brian Casey
0:15:16
priority, but it's not the number one business priority.

Alex Winter
0:15:19
Yeah, that makes sense.

Brian Casey
0:15:21
And ultimately, like, you find yourself as a business, if you're ready to have this be one of your top three priorities, that's one of the times where it makes sense to have a conversation with a coach. If it's not, and it's going to get deprioritized, you're not ready to have any kind of a conversation with a coach and you should do it in a DIY sense.

Alex Winter
0:15:44
Yeah, well that makes sense because it is an investment and it's a large investment. We're talking about a two year plan, at least a 12 month to two year plan, and then we're talking about hiring at least one person, if not two people, so when you start to think about

Alex Winter
0:15:56
what that costs plus the cost of coaching, like you're making a pretty serious investment so if you're not gonna go all in, it probably isn't the best move for you to make, and you should maybe start off DIY to at least get a sense of what it's really gonna take to make this happen.

Alex Winter
0:16:09
That makes a lot of sense.

Brian Casey
0:16:11
Yeah, and I mean, when you start working with a coach, you're going to have priorities. There are priorities to hold yourself accountable to. Your business has to be ready to accomplish the priorities. The last thing that me as a coach or as a business you would want in working with a coach

Brian Casey
0:16:29
is to come to a meeting and say, hey, we didn't get anything that we talked about done.

Brian Casey
0:16:35
Yeah.

Brian Casey
0:16:36
Because that's the point at which I'm, as a coach, like, then what are we doing here?

Alex Winter
0:16:40
Right, well, and how are you gonna be able to help them if every meeting there's no progress, there's nothing to coach and train on because there's no movement happening. That's a tough position all around, yeah, makes sense. Yep.

Alex Winter
0:16:51
So you do a lot of this, Brian. I know that you've helped a large amount of companies implement the AskVance or work towards endless customers. Do you have a story or something you can share just so that people can hear, like, if they decide to go all in and they want to hire a coach or a trainer, what could potentially happen to their business?

Brian Casey
0:17:08
Yeah, so I think I've talked about them on the podcast before, but Zion Springs is one of my favorite companies. They had learned of They Ask, You Answer a while ago. They had been doing it on their own. The thing they actually came to us for initially was they were trying to figure out from a technology standpoint how to get better analytics. And that led to an entire other conversation that came out of it. But they but they had been in this wedding venue space for years. They didn't want to be reliant on wedding wire.

Brian Casey
0:17:44
They didn't want to be reliant on these third-party paid place sites, but they hadn't been able to see any traction. And so they came to us like two years into like thinking about, they ask, you answer, thinking about what they could do in that environment,

Brian Casey
0:18:02
dipping their toes in the water, and if we look at their traffic, their leads, their close rate, like all of those things now, they're actually able to get some pretty quick results. I would say quicker than average. Okay.

Brian Casey
0:18:16
Because they had two writers that they could leverage pretty quickly. Oh, nice. They had a videographer that was already on staff at the wedding venue because they're a wedding venue and they have to have a videographer

Brian Casey
0:18:31
that was able to produce video. And they were able to just jump in. They had one salesperson and that salesperson was able to totally just dive in.

Brian Casey
0:18:41
That's great.

Alex Winter
0:18:42
So it sounds like they already had some of the team in place because they had already been looking at the ask and answer and the way their business was set up. They were already positioned to do some of that. But I think the other week we were talking about this, that they're at a point now where

Alex Winter
0:18:55
they have so much business coming in that the problem now is they're trying to figure out how to service all the businesses coming in, which is a great problem to have.

Brian Casey
0:19:02
Yeah, Debbie, their salesperson is one of the salespeople that I work with that is most in tune with disqualification. Okay. And what I mean by that is ultimately, they have enough people that come to them

Brian Casey
0:19:21
that Debbie has seen, like, I know this person's probably not gonna work out, it's probably gonna become a budgetary issue, or they don't even like our style of venue, that she's looking to disqualify as much as she's looking to qualify people at this point,

Brian Casey
0:19:36
which is a luxury that you get to at a certain point of like they asking it's maturity, where it's like we do have confidence to say like, you're probably not a great fit for us. That's like the thing in the book that everybody's like, man, that is awesome.

Brian Casey
0:19:49
You can turn down bad fit business.

Brian Casey
0:19:52
Right.

Alex Winter
0:19:54
Which it sounds counterintuitive, because most businesses, when you're starting out, it's like you're taking whatever you can get because you want the revenue and you want to keep it going, but that doesn't always work out. And I'm sure a lot of business owners can relate to the fact that you might have taken

Alex Winter
0:20:05
on a few clients that ended up not helping the business and were more trouble than they were actually worth. So to be able to get to a spot where your leads are flowing, your analytics are set up correctly, you're implementing the ask and answer correctly, and you can be selective with the clients you get to work with, I mean, that's the dream scenario, I think.

Alex Winter
0:20:25
Very cool.

Brian Casey
0:20:26
Yeah, especially from a profitability standpoint.

Brian Casey
0:20:28
Yeah.

Brian Casey
0:20:29
I think every sales organization knows there's certain clients or certain opportunities you take on that make sense from a revenue standpoint, but if you were to have the luxury of qualification and disqualification, and both were okay, you look at it and a lot of the ones that you bring on

Brian Casey
0:20:45
end up becoming the ones that get out of scope or the ones that cost a lot more money, a lot more time that goes into servicing. And those become your profit holes more than anything else.

Alex Winter
0:20:56
Totally, yeah.

Alex Winter
0:20:57
You got my wheels spinning, man.

Alex Winter
0:20:58
This has been a great conversation. So this is my favorite part, and I'm pulling this from the book. Marcus always talks about the one thing. What's the one thing that business owners should be thinking about if they're entertaining,

Alex Winter
0:21:09
they ask you to answer and implementing this framework? DIY, coaching, what's the one thing they should take away from this conversation?

Brian Casey
0:21:19
So the one thing isn't, does it make sense, they ask, you answer. Like fundamentally, I think we have to, as a sales and marketing community, understand that the principles behind they ask, you answer have existed for a long time

Brian Casey
0:21:34
and they match where the current buyer is headed. And that's independent of B2B, B2C. So the one thing is really, if these things are true, how ready are we to capitalize on

Brian Casey
0:21:46
them?

Brian Casey
0:21:48
Are we at a place as a business where we are ready to make a human investment? And if so, how do we capitalize on the investment? Do we feel like we have internally the systems, processes, and knowledge to facilitate that person succeeding? Or do we need to augment that? But there's certain things that are just have to be true. You've got to have someone to own the effort.

Brian Casey
0:22:10
That is just a baseline. That person's got to be in place, whether that's someone who internally has a reallocation of their time or net new person to the team. And then it's really asking the big picture question about my organization. Do we have the skills, do we have the knowledge,

Brian Casey
0:22:31
do we have the structure to get the right person in place and help them to succeed or do we want to augment that and potentially move faster and get better results quicker?

Alex Winter
0:22:43
Absolutely, well said.

Alex Winter
0:22:45
Well said, thanks for sharing your experiences and your knowledge with us. I really appreciate your time, Brian. Amen.

Brian Casey
0:22:50
Yeah, well, thanks again for being on the show.

Alex Winter
0:22:53
And for everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex Winter. You just heard from Brian Casey. We'll see you on the next episode. We'll see you on the next episode.