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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
1234.
Talia Wolf [00:00:01]:
Exit, exit, exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
All right. We have both been battling child given colds and illnesses the last couple weeks, but we're here. We're here now. Talia, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Can you give some people, give us some background on who you are and what you do?
Talia Wolf [00:00:29]:
Yeah. So my name is Talia. I'm the founder of Getuplift, which is a conversion optimization agency. And our specialty is in actually increasing conversions with emotion. So understanding why people buy from you, the real why not features pricing technology, but the real why, the intent and the emotion behind the decision and leveraging that to create better experiences that, that get more leads and sales for our clients. So we run experiments for them and I teach this thing, and it's a lot of fun.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:05]:
How did you get into this world? You've been operating this. So this is your. Is it? And do you run a solo consultancy type business? Do you have a team? Give me some more background on your company.
Talia Wolf [00:01:15]:
Yeah, we're an agency. There's a team. This is my second agency. So I had a conversion optimization agency before, and then I went to work in a startup and I hated it. Went back and I was like, I just want to do this. This is what I love. But I got into CRO specifically when I was working in social media. So my background was, like, driving traffic and mostly, like, getting likes and comments on Facebook and stuff for clients.
Talia Wolf [00:01:51]:
But I was super interested in, like, hey, are we actually getting any results? Like, is anyone actually selling or doing something here? No one knew because no one used Google Analytics back then. That's how long I've been in this game. And, yeah, so I started just playing around with stuff and, like, changing the color of a call to action button and changing the headline of something, and nothing, like, really had a good result. So I started thinking about, okay, how can I make a real change? And I figured that, hey, if I really want to have an impact, I need to understand how people make buying decisions and then I can impact those. So that's kind of where it started, just kind of research and trying things out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:30]:
Okay, we're going to dive deep into b two b buying and all that stuff, but I'm going to put that on pause. I made a note. I'm going to put that on pause for a second. Tell me about agency versus startup life, because I've only worked on the company side and a lot of people have said I did like the solo. I was doing solo consulting for a while and everybody's like, don't start an agency. Don't start an agency. You love the agency world. Tell me the other side of this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:55]:
What do you like about having it, about owning and running an agency?
Talia Wolf [00:02:58]:
I think what I love the most is I love what we've built. In. The previous agency that I had and worked in, it was a lot bigger, and I felt like we weren't doing the work that we wanted to do. So I feel like when you hire an agency, a lot of the time you buy into this person that you really like, and you like their ideas and their concept, and you buy into it, and then you get passed on to, like, five tiers down, and then, like, the work isn't as good as promised. That, actually, I did not like. And it's why I started a boutique agency, which is more, it's smaller, but I get to still do the work, and I love it. So I love what I do, and I love the people that I've hired, and I love the team. And I think it just gives me, what I really like about it is because we're in b two b, and we're dealing with emotion.
Talia Wolf [00:03:49]:
There's just so much to learn all the time. And I just, I really enjoy doing the work itself. And it's great to constantly meet new people, new faces, new industries, and dive deep into something so there's never a dull moment. It's never like, oh, this is what I'm selling, and this is what I'm doing. There's always a bunch of things. An interesting project.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:10]:
So do you, how do you like, when it comes to running an agency, ultimately, everybody talks about, you know, scale. Right. And how do we, how do we get more clients? How do we grow this business? What's your perspective? You kind of use that word intentionally. A boutique agency.
Talia Wolf [00:04:26]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:26]:
How do you think about the type of business that you want to build or that you have been building? You've been doing this for a little bit.
Talia Wolf [00:04:32]:
Yeah. It's different. I don't see it as, like, a huge scale thing. Like, I'm not gonna have 100 employees. I'm not even gonna have 50. Probably won't even get to 25. I don't know. I mean, things might change, but really, the way the business works is we have the agency side and we have the training side.
Talia Wolf [00:04:51]:
So there's courses that we teach, too, which are self served. And that is part of how we're growing the agency, because a big part of what I love to do is teach. So I think, I think there's room for both and I think that as long as you are reaching the right clients, then you don't have to over grow and scale and take on clients that you don't want or don't or aren't a good fit. I can see five years into the agency, but I'm not looking like, hey, what's going to happen in ten or 15?
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:24]:
So that also could be an interesting revenue channel or it probably already is today. Basically treating content as a product and saying, okay, I don't want a team of 50 or 100. Could I build a business where we have a point of view, we have a way of doing things? Could we do a one to many thing where we're going to record, you know, create an awesome course and training on a particular topic and that becomes a digital product that you sell and then maybe there's a handful of, like, really good fit customers that come from the bottom of that funnel. Is that how you think about it?
Talia Wolf [00:05:56]:
Definitely. I'm also writing a book about it now. So.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:59]:
Cool.
Talia Wolf [00:06:00]:
We have the course emotion sells, and I'm now writing a book about leveraging emotion in b two b, which is kind of, I don't know, people always think, oh, yeah, of course you use emotion in b two c B two b. That's not a thing. So I'm going to write a book about that. But, yeah, I think that's the goal ultimately, is that the people that can take the course, they learn it, but the people that want us to come in and actually help them do it, hire us for the agency and the work that we do, and we have a lot of good stuff that we can do for them.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:31]:
Cool. There's a lot of people that listen that work at agencies or I just know in the industry of marketing, there's a lot of people that we're knowledge workers that have built up, most people listening have built up like a certain set of scale. There might be a product marketing person or a pr person. And so anytime I have somebody on that's from an agency, I like to talk a little bit more about your business also, because my job is I want to help people that are in marketing. I want to help them win and build successful careers. And that could mean inside of a company, or it could mean you go and build your own consultancy and build your own agency. And so that's just kind of where I'm asking that from. I want to give some, like, somebody could be listening to this, be like, yeah, you know what? I'm going to go and try to start my own thing now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:11]:
And so I wanted to put some light on that side also.
Talia Wolf [00:07:13]:
I love that. I also think that you can build your own thing while you're doing something else. I know it's kind of like against most popular advice, people are like, quit everything you're doing and build. I don't think you have to. You can build your own authority and you can start writing about the way you do things because that's kind of where it started for me. I was at the startup and I already had built the emotional methodology, but I was at the startup and I didn't want to actually continue working at the startup. I was six months pregnant with my first kid, and I spoke to my friend Joe, Joanna Weave, and I said, you know what? I think I'm just going to write a book about this and I'm going to quit and we'll see what happens. And she basically said, you know what, don't turn it into a book.
Talia Wolf [00:07:58]:
Turn it into a course. You have, like a few months, so turn it into a course. And I did, and that was the first product. It wasn't even an agency yet. The first product was a course, and then later I developed it into, okay, now let's do the consultancy. Now let's do the agency. And it was a very good path for me. So I think there's a lot of ways to do that when you are feeling that you have something good to put out there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:24]:
How important is having that framework or methodology? I've done a bunch of consulting in the past, and I love, I love positioning and messaging and company storytelling. And I was like, oh, maybe this before. I kind of went in all in on my business. Now, exit five. I was like, maybe I'll build an agency there or build some type of business there. And I did okay with it, but I didn't have, like, a methodology. And I hear you talk about emotion. I talked to April Dunford a bunch, and she has her book and her framework.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:53]:
I've studied, like, Donald Miller and Storybrand. It seems like the successful people, either agency or consultancy, with some type of knowledge work like conversion optimization or positioning or copywriting. You can't just be like, yeah, I'll help you with your positioning. How can I help you? You have, was this intentional? Or like, did you, did you say, I need to pick this lane, and my thing is going to be emotion, and so I'm going to teach people this emotion based framework. You know what I'm trying to get at? Like, it's like, you have everyone that's been successful in the consulting or agency world. I've seen has their way, has their methodology, talk about how important that has been strategically, I think it's really important.
Talia Wolf [00:09:33]:
And I think very similar to April who, you know, started, was tasked in doing positioning for a company. When she first started out, it wasn't like she came into these companies and knew what to do. She read all the books, she tried all the frameworks. They didn't work for her. And from that pain, she created her own methodology, and that's what got her to where she is today. And then writing these books for me, it was really the same. I was trying to increase conversions. It was sucking, and I had to find the way to solve this pain.
Talia Wolf [00:10:09]:
Right. So I created this methodology and I started doing it for clients, and I found that it was a big piece that people were missing. I really saw that when you look in the offline world and you look in ads and, you know, in television ads, on radio, everything's emotional and everyone knows that you get people with emotion, but then you look in the online world and everything's so technical and everything's about the money and everything is very kind of cold. And when I started leveraging this new framework with clients, especially in b two B, the results were really great. And I saw that that is a great opportunity for us to bring our value because, you know, ultimately, these days, it wasn't like that when I started out. But these days, there's thousands of conversion optimization agencies like anyone's a conversion optimization consultant, but no one does what we do. And when you are in the b two B world and you are looking at your results and you're trying to get x amount of trials a year, or you're trying to get to your mqls or pqls or whatever you're trying to reach, and you're not getting there, you know, it's not a tactic. There's something foundational missing.
Talia Wolf [00:11:22]:
It's something to do with not really nailing messaging yet, not really understanding who your ICP is, not really doing the research the way you should, and that's when you understand you need something deeper. And that's where we come in. So I feel like the framework has been, and our methodology has been tremendous for our success and everything we do. And I'm also very passionate about it, which helps me continue to talk about it and bring in more people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:49]:
Thats a good story because theres a common thread there. You mention it with April, you mentioned it with your way. If youre somebody with experience you used your own brain, youre like, there isnt a methodology that I like and so im going to make one. Lets look through the things that ive done in my experience and put this together. I do think especially with things that you can win in multiple different ways, like conversion optimization and positioning and messaging, there is never going to be one way to do it. And I think if you have your people want your way, though, they want Talia to like lead me and so they want to be, they want to hear that you have a framework and I want to pay you because you seem like an expert through the stuff that I've read and listen to. Okay, now take me through your method. And I think that's liberating for people to hear just in that, like if the framework doesn't exist, make it up, make your own way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:39]:
Like, there is not one way to do this.
Talia Wolf [00:12:42]:
Agreed. And I do think it is. It's very helpful for you, too, when you're running a business because it helps, you know, what step one, what's step two and what step three? So a lot of the times it's guesswork, right? You're reading blog posts, you're trying to figure out what to do. And if you have a methodology and you have a process that keeps evolving, like what I did in emotional marketing or emotional optimization a decade ago isn't what I'm doing now. It's different. It's evolved, but it's still from the same point of view, it still has the same foundational kind of ideas and what we believe in, and that helps guide everything that you do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:21]:
All right, so let's talk about your beliefs a little bit. You said, I have some good notes from you. There are two common emotions that drive b two b buying decisions, and you can use those to translate to better copy design and funnels that convert. Let's rewind all the way back to the highest level for people. Almost everybody here works in the space of b two b marketing or, you know, works at a company that is in the b two b space. And so they fall in this, in the, in the b two b bucket here. What are the emotions in b two b?
Talia Wolf [00:13:51]:
Do I have to convince people there's emotions in b two b? Where are we at? Because I feel like that's usually the first step.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:58]:
Yes, I think you should. I think people that listen to this podcast are very smart and they're much more enlightened in there. But I do think it's worth talking about that again because I think it makes for great marketing content. Like the difference between b two B and b two C. But my belief has always been like, you're marketing, you're selling something to a person. I actually distinguishing between b two B and b to c because you're selling to a person. It's just different. Because instead of me trying to buy a new shirt or some makeup online, right, this is I'm buying something that might cost $75,000, take two months to implement.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:32]:
I need to go through an approval process and implementation process. This is for my job. There's a lot of the stakes are much different. Throw out cover up b two B versus b two C. I think that's the way that I like to think about it. But yes, I'd love to hear your perspective.
Talia Wolf [00:14:45]:
I completely agree with everything you just said. And ultimately there's a difference between when you're buying something for yourself or you're buying something for a company. There's so many emotions that people feel when they're choosing a software. You're worried about how people are going to respond, you're going to worry about whether people actually adopt this tool or not, or you're going to be blamed for something. Or if you're migrating stuff like if you're changing an email software or you're changing the project management solution you're using, what if everything that you do and you have right now gets deleted in like a freak accident when it migrates to the other tool? Right. There's just so many different emotions. And I think when we talk about emotion, as you said, like, oh, everyone agrees that in e commerce that makes sense, but it's actually scientific. It's not like, oh, we think people buy with emotion.
Talia Wolf [00:15:31]:
Like it's a scientific thing. Everyone knows this. It's been proven time and time by so many neuroscientists and psychologists without emotion, we lack the ability to make any decision in life. And one thing that we really need to understand is that we're not selling to businesses, we're selling to people. But I think the name B two B is like business to business is very kind of confusing and makes us feel like we're just selling to a business and not an actual person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:59]:
My favorite thing is like explaining that to a neighborhood or a mother in law, trying to explain b two B, just forget about it. Somebody works at a company, that's all.
Talia Wolf [00:16:10]:
Exactly. And I think it's a lot more emotional actually than a personal decision. And actually there was a recent study by Google that found that b two B buyers are eight times more likely to purchase a pricier. So something that costs more pricier product if they see a personal benefit for themselves. So there's an emotion. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:35]:
Well, also, I like where you're going with this. I actually think you can make the argument that emotion is almost more important in b two B. Yeah, for those reasons. And. Well, yeah, for sure. Of course you do. But also, I think one thing that, like, we don't often think about is there's typically many tools and competitors are perceived competitors. Like in the b two B space.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:00]:
Right. And so let's say you sell to HR. You're trying to. It's some HR software, right. And it costs $100,000 a year. You don't think that the person who's going to buy that is also going to evaluate two or three other vendors? Like, most people are not necessarily buying, they're shopping. And when that is true, you have the opportunity to. Then you go to g two and you read their list of 500 features, and I'm like, I'm even more confused now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:28]:
All these, like, I just switched payroll providers for my business. I don't. They all look the same, pretty much. Right. But if you have an opportunity, like, how do you not play the feature game? Is something that I've always thought about. Like, how do we not make it so, like, oh, when we line up the feature checklist? Well, we had this check, and they didn't. I want to win on emotion. I want to win on the brand.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:51]:
And I think that's exactly the opportunity in b two B is to tell a better story, is to be more relatable, is to be the expert for your ideal customers, to help them buy. Because then, when all things are considered, okay, these three products kind of look the same. But, like, this company just had a much better, did a much better job of relating to me and marketing to me.
Talia Wolf [00:18:08]:
That's the company I'm going to buy from 100%. And one thing that we should remember is that ultimately, you do have many, many competitors, and your competitor at any time, can just add the feature that you're boasting about right now. So it's never gonna be about features, and it's never gonna be about pricing. And we've actually watched hundreds and hundreds of people shop on b two b. Right. And we've seen the same thing over and over again. And the way the buying decision works in b two b is that they'll go to the homepage and they'll immediately go to the pricing page. The pricing page is just there for the first time for them to evaluate if it's all like every competitor they're looking at, is it the same price range? If it's the same price range, they're not even gonna look at the list.
Talia Wolf [00:18:51]:
They're just, okay, great. Then they go to the features. Does it have all the features that I want? Fantastic. Now, how do I make a decision? The way they make a decision is by how much you relate to them. Are you making it about them? Are you making it about their specific challenge and how you're gonna solve it? So many b two b. I literally just wrote a post about this, is that every single b two b company I've seen in the past three years says the all in one software to do this, the all in one, the all in one, everyone's using the same message because we don't really know what to say. But the all in one is also an emotional message, right? Because we're so overwhelmed with using so many tools in b two b that we're all really looking for. Like this one tool that will reduce everything else that we're doing.
Talia Wolf [00:19:38]:
But I feel like everyone in b two B just looks the same because we're all talking about features, everyone's talking about their pricing, and they're all talking about technology. Right now everyone's saying, powered by AI because that's the big thing. But there's no real way to stand out. And the only way to stand out is when you make it about your customers. And you were talking before about those two emotional triggers, like the most powerful emotions in b two B. So the first one is self image. Self image is how I feel about myself when I'm buying a product right now. How do I feel about myself? And how do I want to feel about myself after buying the solution? Do I want to feel more confident? Do I want to feel proud? In the work that I do, there's different types of emotions that you feel and you want to feel about yourself.
Talia Wolf [00:20:29]:
The other emotion is social image, and that is huge in b two B, how I want other people to perceive me after buying a certain product or tool. I want them to think that I'm the go to person. I want them to think I'm knowledgeable. I want to get a career advancement. I want people to put me on a pedestal. There's different emotions. And if you're able to reflect that in your social proof, in your messaging, in the visuals that you're using, that's where you're going to win. Because as you mentioned, they're just going to go to the website and that's what they're going to look for.
Talia Wolf [00:21:05]:
They're going to see, do you understand me? And not, you know, the features and the tech.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:09]:
I love that. So how do you, how do you coach somebody to go and find those things? So if I'm listening to this podcast right now, I'm like, cool, that's great. This woman's really smart. I need this. I need to do this. Where do I start? How do I go and do an audit and like, figure out those things for my business?
Talia Wolf [00:21:26]:
Well, the good news is that not a lot of people are doing it. The bad news is it's not easy. So. But it is the way to stand out, right? It's research. It's always going to be about the research. So the key is interviewing your customers. It's running surveys on your customers, it's doing visitor surveys, it's doing social listening, review, mining, and really getting to know your customers beyond the behavioral information. So if I were to ask you right now, you know, who your customers are, most people would reply, you know, they're between 34 to 42, female.
Talia Wolf [00:22:06]:
This is their geographical location. These are the devices that they're using. But what I'm trying to get to is the emotions. So in order to do that, you need to conduct customer interviews and surveys that are deeper and dive into that value that they are getting from your product. So you don't want to be asking them about what features they like or, you know, would they recommend this to their friend or how would you rate me? But you want to be asking them about, you know, what were they feeling and what brought them to your website and what problem does your solution lessen or eliminate for them? Or how would you describe us to your friend? What would happen if you could no longer use this product anymore? How would you feel? What would you miss the most? These are all questions that aren't being asked and should be if you want to better understand those pains and the desired outcomes. So when you're doing the research, the goal is really to ask yourself, what are the top three pains that my prospect feels before finding a solution, and how do they want to feel after finding a solution? That's what's kind of guiding you with everything that you do. And the customer surveys and interviews help with that a lot because that's when you uncover it. And the funny thing is you asked, hey, how do I start with this? Is that once you have those insights, when you go to your homepage or you go to your pricing page or the solutions page.
Talia Wolf [00:23:31]:
You're just going to see it. You're just going to say, oh my gosh, we're saying these things people don't care about. We're telling stories people don't relate to. We're using the terms people don't use. We're highlighting the value or we're not highlighting any value. We're just talking about ourselves. So once you do the research, it is a lot easier to suddenly see whats wrong and whats not working and how to fix it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:56]:
Trey, can you talk about blending research with your own intuition and gut? Because I feel like the people that ive seen that do this really well, that bring emotion into their company story. Companies that are really good at positioning CEO's and founders who are really good at company storytelling and strategic narrative, they do this research but theres also a certain level of intuition and gut and like, yeah I got this data but like we're gonna pick this narrative and I'm kind of leading the witness a little bit here. I'm kind of leading you because my opinion is that like I believe in research, but I do feel like some people can also use it as a crutch. Like you're just waiting to find this like perfect thing in there. Where I do think this is an art, this is a skill, there is some risk to doing this. It's not always going to be obvious. You need to pick a lane and go and have some vision. And I wanted to see if you could shed some light on that.
Talia Wolf [00:24:50]:
Yeah, I agree. I think the good thing about what I do in optimization is that whenever I'm doing research, I have a very specific question, which is how do I make this specific page better so that more customers buy? So it's easy to see what's not working in Google Analytics and find out if it's the homepage, the pricing page or product page, if it's whatever. And it's kind of easy to launch an experiment and an A B test. What's hard to know is what to change and what changes you will make or you can make to increase conversions and get more, you know, free trials for example. The research is helpful in a way that it uncovers what's not working, but you still have to have your hypothesis. And I think there are people that have stronger intuition and I think when you are, when you speak to people in sales, in the company, or you speak to people who are in customer success, that's where you can learn a lot more because they are the people that are actually speaking to your customers. So I think it's a blend of it all, is you have your insights, you've uncovered this, you have an hypothesis. Like, these are the three things that are leading people to my website, and this is how they want to feel, and then you can test it.
Talia Wolf [00:26:09]:
And there's also. It's a lot easier to answer that question because you go to the sales team and you say, hey, you know, this is what I'm seeing. Are you seeing this? Are these questions that people are asking you before buying? I definitely think there's some intuition to it, but I don't think you have to have it to succeed. I think you can get started. And the more you test and the more you try things, the better you will get at understanding who your customers are and adapting. And I think the biggest role here is not to be too in love with your own ideas and be willing to throw out a lot of those for what's actually working.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:51]:
All right, so one thing that's interesting here is conversion and b, two b, websites and emotion. It impacts the whole funnel, right? The whole experience, the whole buying experience. What's your opinion on this is like a very specific question, but I don't mean it as specific as I say. What's your opinion on calls to action? And here's what I mean by that. I feel like a lot of b. Two B websites, it's like the graphics, the story, and then the only. And then it's like, book a demo. Right? Contact sales.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:27]:
But then there's, like, all this narrative online about, like, you need to drive high intent. Like, yes, of course, high intent visitors are always going to be better than low intent visitors. But if you're driving everyone to this website and the only thing that you can do on the website is contact sales, well, like, I'm not ready to contact sales yet. And also, none of us are morons. We know what's going to happen if I go to your website and I don't really have a pressing need to buy this thing right now. Then you, you better believe there's no way in hell I'm going to click contact sales because that means I'm going to get a call right now. I'm going to get endless emails. I don't want to be in part of that process.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:03]:
However, I'm interested in the thing you have to offer. And so I'm interested in, like, what's your latest thinking on conversion and that journey? Like, I believe in the positioning. I believe in bringing emotion into this but actually bridging the gap to like get somebody to take action. What's the right, what's your philosophy on call to actions?
Talia Wolf [00:28:24]:
Yeah, no, I get that. I still think that is definitely conversion because I don't think conversion is just book a demo or start free trial or, you know, subscribed, paid subscriber. I think one of the biggest opportunities is for us to identify where people are in their stage of awareness. And that is, you know, if you have a lot of people, and I'm not going to talk specifically about the homepage because I think the homepage is always a tricky one for SaaS and B, two B, because it's a catch all, everyone's coming to it. You've got people logging in, you've got people who are just landing there for the first time. You've got people who are sending other people to it. So it's kind of, it's a hard page to get right. And there's a lot of different kind of weeding that, you know, that you need to do there.
Talia Wolf [00:29:13]:
But generally every page on your website has a role and it doesn't always have to be about that immediate conversion you have, you know, sometimes we work on comparison pages for SaaS and a lot of that isn't even about booking a demo or starting a free trial. It's just to convince you that you should, you know, this product is better than something else and keep on. Like, we'll talk again, but here's just some information about this. And I think the key is really understanding where people are in the journey. And if all you have is contact sales on your entire website, you're doing it wrong. Because sometimes b two B cycles can take like a year or six months. It's not going to happen by you forcing people to contact you. And you have to have the white papers there.
Talia Wolf [00:30:04]:
You have to have the right social proof, you have to be, you know, you have to have the videos people can read. You know, you have a lot of people who are just solution aware. Solution aware people are those who are just trying to figure out, do they even need a platform? Do they even need a software? Maybe I want to hire a consultant, maybe I want a va. All that content has to be there and you have to serve that to people at the right time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:30]:
You just snuck in some like, you snuck in some like marketing 301 401 level advice in there and I'm going to make you rewind and talk about that. You talked about solution aware.
Talia Wolf [00:30:41]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:42]:
This is the next level of thinking that I think more people need to hear. It's. Can you talk about what that means and what some of the other stages might be and how to think about them?
Talia Wolf [00:30:51]:
Sure. It's not mine. It's by Eugene Schwartz, who is like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:54]:
That'S why I asked you. So I have. I got this book. Wait, let me see. Anyway, it's all myself over there, but this guy, Ryan Dice, sent me this book years ago, and I was broke, and I wasn't going to buy this for myself. And so he spent like, $300 and sent me this copy, and he wrote a handwritten note on the inside, and he said, dave, just read chapters two and three. Stages of awareness. The notes, that's like, stages of awareness will get you to 99%, and you'll be smarter than every other marketer out there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:20]:
And I flipped to it, and I got to Eugene Schwartz stages of awareness. And so when I hear people talk about it, we got to shed light on this for everybody else.
Talia Wolf [00:31:27]:
Okay, so Eugene Schwartz basically addresses the most important thing of a funnel. And this, again, it takes me back to the difference between B two c, or, you know what the difference between offline and online and offline, like television ads or radio ads, they understand that you're not going to convert there and there, right then and there. So they add the information that you need, and then they expect you at some point to go to the website or to call them online. It's a lot about sell, sell, sell, now, now, now. And that's not how the human mind works, and that's not how people go through buying decisions. Eugene Schwartz talks about five stages that people go through when they're buying something. The first stage is unaware. Unaware.
Talia Wolf [00:32:17]:
People are people who have no idea they even have a problem. They're just going about their lives, and they're like, ah, everything's great, right? They don't know. So a lot of startups that are, like, disrupting stuff need to kind of shed a light on people who are unaware and say, oh, my God, have you not noticed you're experiencing all this pain? But you don't go and say, you're experiencing this pain. Solve it now. Pay now $500. You're just like, here's this pain that you're feeling. Then you have people who are pain aware. That's stage number two.
Talia Wolf [00:32:49]:
Pain aware. People are people who are aware of the pain that they have, but they don't actually know they could solve it. They're just like, well, this is life. You know? Like, if they have a team that's distributed all over the world. And they have, they're struggling to communicate with people in Australia and the states and England, but they're like, well, that's, that's just what it's like. They don't, they don't know there's a solution out there. And they're like, just pain aware. Then you have solution aware, which is what I was talking about just a minute ago.
Talia Wolf [00:33:16]:
Solution aware people are people who understand that there may be a solution. And now they're looking into, what could that be? Should I hire a consultant to figure out communication in my company? Should I fire everyone and only hire, you know, right here in my country, is there a tool that can help us collaborate? These are people who are now on blog posts, and they're asking their friends and they're watching videos and they're talking about the problem and they're trying to figure out, should they hire someone, should they get a tool? Then you have product aware. Product aware people are people who are actively comparing you to your competitor. And believe it or not, this is actually the first time you should be talking about yourself. Everything before that is just about them, what they're going through, their pain, and the different solutions that are out there. Only when you get to product aware is when you can start talking about, okay, here's the differences between me and my competitor and why you should choose us. And then you have most aware. And most aware people are those who are ready to buy.
Talia Wolf [00:34:19]:
You just have to show them the right call to action. What I really love, though, about stages of awareness is that you don't have to bring someone from unaware to most aware. All you have to do is to take wherever your customers right now and move them to the next step. If they're solution aware, you have to bring them to product aware. If they're unaware, all you have to do is make them aware. So every stage in your funnel is built around moving them to the next stage where they're ready to convert. And that's when, you know, ads look a certain way and they're just talking about the pain. You have blog posts that are talking about solutions.
Talia Wolf [00:34:57]:
You have your pricing page and feature pages that are talking about your features, and so on and so on. So it's just, it's a good way to segment, which is not a nice, not a word that I like to use, but it's a good way to segment your customers. So you know what? Call to action to give them. Sign up to my email list. Read this. Watch this video. Now you can try. Now free trial now book a sales call now buy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:23]:
Love that. So thinking about, I know you, you don't want to talk about homepages because I'm going to ask you anyway, because it always comes up. So given that, given that there are multiple stages of awareness or people are at different stages as it relates to being ready to buy from your business or not, right. They might not even know you exist. They might not even know they have the problem. They might not even know there's a solution. Yada, yada. How do you think about the website and what purpose does it serve? I found that it's easy to get the website right when you have like a specific product offering for like one Persona in a niche.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:57]:
That's the glo, those are the glory days, right? You got, we can do one specific thing, but this, like this double edged sword, because as you have success, your business starts growing, you now sell to, and most people that are listening are at like b, two b, software companies. And so you go up market, you expand, you target multiple Personas, you have multiple industries, you have multiple use cases, how do you think about the website in that context? In that it is very hard to. We got one message that speaks to, we need to have one message that speaks to five audiences or five messages that speak to five audiences, then gets confusing. What's your philosophy on the overall purpose of the homepage and the website when you're selling to multiple Personas?
Talia Wolf [00:36:37]:
I do like to treat the homepage as more of like a roadmap. So if you are now going on a journey and you want to get somewhere, then you would go to the homepage and it would show you where you need to go. If you want to learn about this, you would click here. If you want to try this, you click here. If you want to know if this is for you, you would click here. The homepage, other than the hero section, which the hero section is like where you have that, you're supposed to have that like aha moment. When someone lands on your homepage, the first thing they see is the hero section. You have 3 seconds, okay? That's all you have before they jump to the next tab.
Talia Wolf [00:37:15]:
So you have 3 seconds to convince them that this product is for them and you're going to solve this particular pain and, and this is the result they're going to get. Okay? It's a big job. It's a big job for a homepage, especially for a hero section. I see the homepage as more of a jumping board and more of, I want people to come, I want them to say, huh, this is interesting, and start reading. Which is why I always say, hey, don't talk about your product or your technology or your features in the hero section because they will read about it when they decide to. They're going to want to know everything and all the integrations. You don't have to have that in the hero. But ultimately the idea is that you want to create a journey that people kind of naturally know where to go to get the information they want.
Talia Wolf [00:38:07]:
That's not an easy thing to do. But a, you want to make sure that the people coming to your website are maybe going directly to the pages they need to, and b, the homepage needs to include a lot of different pieces on it to direct them in the right direction, to send them to the features page or the solutions page or the pricing page. So the homepage has a lot of heavy lifting to do. But I would always treat it as that, as I said, like a jumping board, like just landing here to go to the right place. So I know where to go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:39]:
Yeah, I love that. I totally, that's completely my philosophy. And I agree. I also just think it's just liberating to, when you have that frame of like, this is what our website should be, then you stop trying to service the need of every regional vp who feels like they're part of the business does not have enough representation with a landing with a page on the website or something like that.
Talia Wolf [00:39:02]:
Yeah. I also think that that's where your navigation comes in. So what happens with a lot of software and b, two b companies that we see is they come to us. I'm like, we have like five types of clients that buy from us. Like our ICP of five different people. That's great. But they don't all need to be on the homepage. So ultimately, and that's what's great about when you're thinking about the emotion and you're not thinking about segmentation, you're not thinking about age or gender, geographical location, you're thinking about what pain am I trying to solve? How do I solve it? And what is the result? The promise that you're making.
Talia Wolf [00:39:40]:
And that's what the homepage should show the CEO or the VP or, you know, whoever's coming to the website that isn't the actual busy bee that's going to use the product is going to evaluate the homepage only as how fast can I find what I'm looking for? Can I find if this has the right pricing? Can I find the features or integrations that I'm looking for. If it's, you know, someone from Dev, you don't have to speak to everyone. When you're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one. So you need to be talking to the person that actually makes the decision.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:15]:
I have a question for you. Let's talk about my favorite topic right now.
Talia Wolf [00:40:18]:
Okay.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:19]:
What's your opinion about chat GPT and AI tools?
Talia Wolf [00:40:22]:
I just knew you were gonna ask them. Oh, AI. I use chat GPT all day, every day. I.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:35]:
In what way? Tell me. Tell people.
Talia Wolf [00:40:38]:
Well, I use it to kind of brainstorm and get ideas. I use it to answer all sorts of questions for my six year old, by the way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:50]:
Me too. I have found myself lately. I have an iPad and my daughter and I will just mess around on the iPad or whatever. And if I have a question, I found myself for work or personally going to chat and asking. Chat GPT more than. More than Google. Although I will say I was making dinner the other night and I texted my wife. She was out with a friend, and I said, I made this amazing salad dressing to go with this steak salad.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:15]:
And I asked Chad chappy tea? And she said, well, you could have just texted me and I would have told you that obviously a balsamic vinaigrette is going to be great with the steak salad. So she's like, I don't know about this hype about cha chi petit.
Talia Wolf [00:41:27]:
I feel like my six year old has, like, very tough questions. Like, we were on a hike and he saw something and it was, like, growing in the walls, and he was like, what is that? I'm like, oh, no. So chat helps a lot with, like, me sounding smarter. I think you can use AI and chatptptpt in a very good way to learn more and brainstorm. But I think the one big thing that marketers keep forgetting is. And so here's the thing. Six months ago, I ran a test in our email list. We sent one email that was written by chat GPT, and one email that I wrote.
Talia Wolf [00:42:08]:
Same blog post, same thing. The email from AI tanked. They both got, like, high open rate, but the click through rate was much higher from my email, which was much longer, by the way, the chat GPT one was short. I really believe that we're not there yet. In that emotional connection that you can, that you can create as a human, it's only as good as what you feed it. And right now, I think you should be using it to leverage it to, like, learn stuff, get ideas, brainstorm, maybe take some shortcuts. But when it comes to writing, messaging, for example, or thinking about how to speak to your customers, or when you're thinking about, like, actually talking to them, you, you have to have a human that understands humans right now at least. Yeah, it's, it's not quite there on the emotional level yet.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:02]:
No. I found, um, recently though, I've been, um, you can give it cus, like custom instructions and I found that as I've learned the voice that I like to write in better. And so I've like, you know, similar to you've been writing, you know, emails, LinkedIn posts, articles, whatever, for years. I feel like if I give chat GPT, my trick has been like, give chat GPT a bunch of things and I've written and then say, describe this style back to me. I'm not very good at describing my writing style and it's just me, it's just how I write. But chat GPT does. And then I can then take that and then save that as a. Helps me write better prompts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:36]:
Or even just this morning I was messing around with just saving custom instructions and I found that if I save the custom instructions, I can at least it's still not perfect. I still would never, like, copy and paste and immediately put it into an email. But what I get back is much, much, much better and then I can go and like edit it, put my tone on it, change that word, remove that corny word that I would never use and then put it in email. And I've, and I found that, like, to your point, it helps me with ideation. I feel like I can move so much faster if I need to send like an invite to a webinar or something. And I'm like, man, I'm just not in the mood for this today. I don't have it. I'll go to chat GPT first and get a head start a little bit.
Talia Wolf [00:44:15]:
Yeah, I love that. I do the same. I haven't thought about asking it to describe my tone and voice. I think that would help a lot. I definitely use it more for ideation and it has, yeah, it's helped me a ton. So things move faster and it gives me like, I'll just, you know, hey, describe the three biggest challenges. B. Two b companies struggle with when it comes to x.
Talia Wolf [00:44:38]:
And looking at that, oh, yeah, I have an idea for blog post now. Bam. And you're like, okay, now I can start typing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:45]:
Love that. All right, this has been a blast. Very enjoyable. Hang. Getting you to hang out. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Talia. I'll put a link to your stuff. Do what everybody does when you listen to this podcast, when we have a great guest.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:55]:
Come on, go find them on LinkedIn. Connect with them, send them a message. Be like, oh, my gosh, that thing that you said about your six year old needing to diagnose, what plant this grows out of the water? Why is the earth round? All the big questions or just thing that I really resonate, that really resonated me with just bringing the importance of emotion in b two b buying and bringing that into making that the core of your marketing, not just in one ad or one email, but really making that the centerpiece of your conversion journey. And I didn't say this earlier in the podcast, but something that really resonates with me is this, to me, is how you fix the conversion problem. It's very rarely like, oh, we need to send two new nurture emails. It's like, I'd much rather go to the root cause and tell a better story than like, we do obsess over these tiny little optimizations. And so often that is not the way to get there. So I loved your perspective.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:43]:
It was great to hang out with you.
Talia Wolf [00:45:44]:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I agree with that. I think that's the hardest part with optimization, is you're constantly looking for, like, if I just change this call to action button, if I just remove another form field. But it's never about that. It's the foundational stuff. And that's why we're able to get great results, is because we're really speaking to people and not businesses.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:05]:
Yes. All right, you nailed it. We'll wrap up. Thanks for hanging out. I'll talk to you later. Goodbye, everybody.
Talia Wolf [00:46:10]:
Exit, exit.