Be a Marketing Essentialist with Peter Sandeen

In This Episode

• [01:55] – Stephan welcomes Peter Sandeen to share how he helps businesses identify unique value propositions through audience-centric messaging.
• [03:00] – Stephan and Peter discuss the challenges of siloed sales and marketing teams, with Peter explaining how this can lead to ineffective targeting and poor sales results.
• [06:44] – Peter discusses the risks involved in switching marketing platforms, including the potential for reputational damage and loss of trust.
• [12:46] – Peter emphasizes the importance of understanding the target customer’s motivations when creating an offer rather than just focusing on their needs or requirements.
• [17:10] – Peter advises looking at what differentiates a product or service from competitors in a way that is meaningful, easy to understand, and believable to customers.
• [21:46] – Peter outlines the final step in creating a unique selling proposition (USP) for a business: crafting a standout message that communicates key differentiators and focuses marketing efforts.
• [33:31] – Peter explains the significance of built-in checks and feedback mechanisms in marketing plans to quickly identify and adjust courses when necessary.
• [45:33] – Stephan encourages Peter to leave a nugget of wisdom to the listeners.

Jump to Links and Resources

Peter, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

We know each other through JVMM, Joint Venture Mastermind. I’ve been a member for at least six years, and I think you’ve been a member for quite a while as well, right?

I think 9-10 years, something like that.

Yeah. Amazing. Dov is such a great guy. What got you to join the community?

It was pretty simple. Danny and you recommended me into the group, and I was like, “hell yeah. Yes, please.” It was partially a no-brainer because I didn’t really have a lot of people to talk to about marketing.

The marketing culture here in Finland is old-fashioned. I’ve had to fight with forward-thinking software startups about how marketing and sales should at least sometimes talk to each other. They often think of it as two completely separate functions, so just having more like-minded people was a relief. There are many interesting people to meet, collaborate, and work with. It’s been an easy decision to stick around.

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Yeah, awesome. What happens when sales and marketing operate as silos and don’t collaborate?

Nothing good. I think the most obvious one is that the goals don’t align. Marketing ends up aiming for as many as possible leads. The quality may technically be there. They may technically match some criteria, like, well, they’re this sort of people, but they are not primed to buy something. They’re not the ones within that group of people who would be most perceptive to buying from this particular company.

Instead of looking at it as what kind of person is most likely to buy and what we need to tell them to want to buy from us, it becomes a question of how we get as many people as technically qualify as the right people. And then it’s those salespeople’s problem if they don’t make sales. Obviously, I’m exaggerating ever so slightly, but not nearly as much as I would like to. I like that to be an exaggeration.

Yes, obviously, you can have separate marketing and sales teams, but the goal is the same: make sales. Whenever there’s that separation, I’ve never seen much of a benefit to it. In comparison, the day-to-day can be separate. That’s fine, but strategy, thinking of what is impacting results, should be mutual.

You can have separate marketing and sales teams, but the goal is the same: make sales.

For example, if the marketing department doesn’t truly understand the buyer objections of the audience that they’re sending as supposedly qualified leads, they’re not preempting those objections through marketing collateral and communications such as email drip campaigns and so forth prior to the sales conversation with the salesperson.

That’s one of the simple examples. The other that comes up a ton is just the market or target audience selection within the market. Salespeople will easily say that our target audience is CTOs of companies with at least a hundred million in revenue or whatever. From a marketing perspective, it would be much more helpful to know that within that group, we’re interested in people who have experience with other companies like ours but are unhappy about their pricing structure or whatever because our pricing structure is very different and more beneficial.

There often is just this mismatch of understanding of the details of information that would be helpful. Objections are just the same. The best way to get rid of objections in sales is to deal with them in marketing. It’s just more effective to deal with an objection before anyone thinks about the objection.

Yeah, it makes total sense. What are the most common objections that you come across with your clients and in your marketing, too?

There is a lot, but I think the one that people often don’t think of as an objection that is an objection is a trust or lack of trust, especially if you sell something that comes with a high risk, and the high risk can be switching to a different software. The risk is not necessarily that this new software is full of malware. The risk is, how much time does it take to implement it? How much time does it take to integrate it? How much time does it take for people to learn to use it? What if there’s a tiny mistake? How big can that one mistake become in the grand scheme of things?

I have a client that has software for multi-physics simulations, if there’s one comma mistake or a calculation error within the software, if there’s a mix-up in those simulations, that can be worth hundreds of millions if not more if it’s not caught. 

The best way to get rid of objections in sales is to deal with them in marketing.

That could end careers, too, right?

Yeah, exactly. The risk is massive. In B2B, I think one of the biggest risks is your reputation. If you’re the person in charge of buying, but it’s not your company, then if you make a mistake, unfortunately, often that means you get fired, you don’t get the promotion, you’re shunned away from future decisions, or trust is a much bigger issue than I think many people consciously think about it.

They see it as trust just happens as we talk for 17 hours with these people. They’ll trust us. But you don’t need to talk for 17 hours with them; you can talk with them once if you’ve already done a ton of trust-building with the marketing, the messaging, the positioning, and everything. I think that’s one of the most obvious ones that comes up.

Switching costs, in other words, are not about the hard costs of going from one platform to another if you need to hire an outside consulting team to implement that switchover, the cost savings from one platform to another, etc. It’s about the risk, de-risking, and bringing attention to those risks because they’re already in the person’s mind, helping alleviate or calm those concerns.

That’s also the one that I come across the most. I sell services that help with the most fundamental parts of your marketing, what your business builds around. There’s a lot of risk involved. If I give bad advice, that can be expensive. Hence, most of my clients are referrals, which is why most of my clients are marketing companies. Marketing companies hire me, and then they talk to other marketing companies and spread the word.

I don’t intentionally do marketing for marketing people; it’s just referrals. I think people often underestimate how significant the risk appears for the other side, often subconsciously, because it isn’t just the hard cost; it’s the opportunity cost, the time, the reputational damage, and all the other things that can go wrong.

I sell services that help with the most fundamental parts of your marketing, what your business builds around.

I think objections can be split into different groups in multiple different ways. There are all sorts of clever acronyms like, oh, there’s time, reputation, money, and so on. You can think of it that way, but I think the more useful way to look at it is to start with the big picture, like trust, risk, money, time, and so on, but then look at much more specific objections, than what people even articulate themselves.

Let’s say that it’s accounting software; maybe they’re worried about not being sure how much time it will take to implement. That’s still a very broad objection. Maybe the objection, more specifically, is we’re not sure how long our tech team will require to understand how it will integrate with our other systems. You can get rid of much of that objection with a much more specific answer. You can just point out that our tech team will deal with your tech team’s trouble dealing with the integration.

There’s no objection to our tech team taking a lot of time to do it. Getting much more specific about what is underneath the objections is—you didn’t ask, but anyway, that’s how I often approach it. Try to get much more specific so you can then change the offer, messaging, positioning, or something so that it doesn’t even come up as an objection.

There are these little techniques or hacks in conversion optimization and overall marketing, like risk reversal, which is a hack and doesn’t get to the core issue. It’s like, you’ll get 100% of your money back. Even better, we’ll give you 200% of your money back or whatever, but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room there. I would feel embarrassed to ask for my money back. I never do that. I don’t send meals back if they’re not tasty at the restaurant. I just feel uncomfortable doing that. That’s not truly a risk reversal; it’s a gimmick.

It can work to some degree, but the more considerate your prospect is, the less effective those gimmicks usually are, and the more it becomes about whether you can truly take away much of the true underlying risk or worry that they’re thinking about. Whether it is reputational or about their tech teams, time management, or whatever it is, the more precisely you can address it, the better.

Let’s walk through your framework or system to overhaul somebody’s messaging or way of communicating the value of their products or services.

The first thing I do is look at or evaluate their target audience and how they define it. Sometimes, we redefine it, but it’s more about getting very specific about how they’re defining it. For example, if you’re in B2B, the industry you’re targeting is more or less irrelevant to your messaging. The company size you’re targeting is usually also more or less irrelevant. They are sometimes important, but usually, they don’t make much of a difference. Similarly, the decision maker’s job title is probably irrelevant.

You can rather think of it in terms of if you’re going to have a conversation with just someone about something, and you need to convince them of something, you need to first understand how they see that topic, to begin with, so that you can start changing their viewpoint or perhaps just align with it perfectly. It doesn’t matter what company size they’re working in, even if you’re talking about some business concept. What matters is what they hope for. What do they expect? What do they believe? What do they fear? What problems have they had before? What experience did they have? And so on.

Understanding their worldview and job title doesn’t really help you understand their worldview.

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Yeah, exactly. To some degree, yes. Someone’s job title can help us better understand their worldview depending on the context of a topic, but that’s very rarely a defining feature. That’s where I start because many companies have never truly gone through this part of the exercise. They’ve done all the demographics like company size, location, industry, etc. Some of the psychographics are as follows: What are their biggest problems? But it’s just scratching the surface.

The first step is to be able to take on the target customer’s perspective. Everything I do is based on being able to look at what you do from your target customer’s perspective so I can tell what I would need to be told and get the right impression.

The second thing I usually do is that we can sometimes skip this, but I like to look at the offer because it’s essentially the question of what you are asking me to do. You’re asking me to buy something in the end, but what is it truly you’re asking me to do? How much time is it going to take? What is it going to be like? Does it address all my objections, worries, fears, hopes, and dreams, or not?

It’s exponentially harder to sell something with even one slight thing off because that’s what I will fixate on as the potential customer. I will fixate on that little thing that doesn’t matter, but it isn’t quite what I wish it to be. If you can get rid of all of those, there’s very little negative for me to fixate on, and it becomes an obvious option.

Yes, you can sell something people don’t want. It’s even easier to sell something that people are slightly annoyed with, but that’s still a massive disadvantage compared to something that is exactly what people want. It makes the messaging part infinitely easier and more effective if you think through the offering, again, from the target customer’s perspective, and this is starting to veer to the messaging side, not from the perspective of what they would write down as their requirements, or what are the things that they value the most, but rather what are the things that motivate them? What are the things that truly drive the decision?

Let’s use your example. I use the same one all the time. People are worried about embarrassment. People often worry about how that decision will reflect on them, even if it doesn’t affect the business. A common one is that someone might be worried about how much time something is going to take from them individually, even if, from the company’s perspective, it’s irrelevant if you, the middle manager, are going to spend a hundred hours or just seven hours on this thing.

In the grand scheme of this hundred-million-dollar project, who cares? But you do, and you’re the one who will either push us forward to the sale or make our lives very hard as salespeople. Thinking through how we can make the offer, what parts of the offer motivate things? Also, what wouldn’t motivate you so that we can steer clear of those? Also, what wouldn’t motivate you so that we can steer clear of those?

That’s the first big part of thinking of the message itself. What is it that motivates people to buy this thing? It is not just our specific thing, but what is motivating on this whole grand topic? If we sell accounting, it’s not just accounting software; it’s how they deal. What motivates them to create better reporting, things related to security and finances, or their own job’s prospects of getting a race, bonuses, how easy it is to manage the team, and so on?

People often worry about how that decision will reflect on them, even if it doesn’t affect the business.

I don’t have any accounting software companies as clients, so I’m rusty on the examples there. That’s the next part, really separating out what is valuable and what is motivating because there’s overlap, but what counts are the things that are motivating and not so much on the valuable parts. It’s the old idea of letting people make the decision emotionally, and then they justify it to themselves logically. We need to tell them the valuable bits of marketing, but we don’t lead with those because we don’t capture someone’s true interest with something valuable.

That relates to the old adage: you sell them what they want and give them what they need.

Yeah, it is similar to that as well.

Okay, step two is looking at the offer from the target customer’s perspective. How about step three?

The next step is looking at what they compare you to. Before they even know you exist, what are the comparisons? It’s not just direct competitors. Some direct competitors might very well be worth looking at because if your target customers likely compare you to specific direct competitors, then by default, they do compare you to those. But there are often also indirect competitors, and then there’s something hard to even call or describe as a competitor.

If you sell therapy services, going out to a bar with your friends is an alternative—not maybe a good one. Maybe it’s a good one for someone, but it might not be a very good solution for talking about your worries. But it is an alternative way to get some camaraderie, talk out your issues, get some reassurance that you’re okay, or something like that.

Typical competitor analysis is wholly insufficient and often misleads people into very poor decisions about what differentiates them or what they think differentiates them. You need to look at all the options that you’re compared to. And then, you can start looking at what you do differently in a way that is meaningful, understandable, easy to understand for people, believable, and so on and so on. It’s looking at what differentiates you in a way that when people see it, ideally, they would then be disappointed with all the other options they have because they wouldn’t get that one thing that differentiates you or those three things that differentiate you.

Start looking at what you do differently in a way that is meaningful, understandable, & believable.

Can you perhaps give an example from a client you worked with?

They are often a little secretive about this part because it makes it easier to challenge them. The basic idea is to look at if you’re a therapist, then what separates you from other therapists, talking with friends and getting drunk? Maybe one thing that separates you is that what you offer is quick. It creates a significant difference in one session.

That would be the kind of differentiator that differentiates all the alternatives, not just the direct competitors. It’s also easy to explain and understand. It might not be easy to believe, so I’m not sure if that would work, but if it is easy to believe, then great. That’s the thing you have to look at.

I think the best way to start is to look at the negative things people associate, like your target customers specifically, are. What do they associate as negative aspects to all the main competitors and alternatives? If you do something opposite to those negatives, brilliant. That’s one of the best ways to find the differentiators that will make a difference.

As a marketing expert, give me an example of how other marketing experts do things in a particular way, and you do them differently.

If you compare me to certain massive consulting companies that many big brands hire, if you hire me, I come in and try to give you an actionable implementation of a solution within a month or two. If it’s just the messaging, we can even do it in two weeks.

Suppose you hire one of those big consulting companies, and you’re probably thinking of the one I now refer to. In that case, they’re going to come in with a motivational speaker, show up to the office, and say to them, now we’re going to overhaul everything and then bring in a busload of 20-somethings with fresh MBAs who are going to camp in your meeting areas for a month or two. Then, they will present you with a PowerPoint presentation about company structure, efficiency, etc. Then, you need to ask how this helps us with messaging. It’s like, “No, this is the framework for which we build the messaging project.” Six months later, you have something resembling messaging.

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Something that separates me is that we can be done in two weeks. You’re going to have ready messaging. We can implement it in another two weeks across the entire company if you want. It’s like speed, and just like focusing on the task at hand, which separates me from most of the alternatives people compare me to, especially in the bigger company space.

Yeah, I like it.

I don’t usually say it quite that directly, but you asked. I hope people can hear the slight exaggeration. However, if you’ve ever hired an unsaid company, you know that I’m not exaggerating much.

Yeah, that was a great, off-the-cuff answer. I like it. What’s step four after you’ve figured out who the target customer compares you to?

The final step is creating what I call the standout message. The idea is to write down very clearly what we want to communicate with marketing. What do we want people to understand first? I think it’s easier to reflect on what the common alternatives are.

USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) are good ideas. The problem is that they’re usually not very practical, and the same is true of value propositions. Anything but practical, those usually come out at some company meeting two times a year. That’s about it because they answer in such a general way, like, what differentiates us? What value do we provide?

The standout message is that you can just give this one piece of paper to anyone who does marketing or any decisions related to marketing or sales. Focus on these things, and then you have pretty free reign on everything else. You can write a million social media posts; just make sure that at least 999,000 of them focus on these specific ideas because these are the things we want people to associate with us.

As long as you stick to this blueprint, it will create a cohesive image of what we are about. It forces all the marketing material to focus on the things that will get people’s attention, make them associate the right things with us, and make them notice the differences that we want them to notice. That’s the final step: putting it into a form that is easy to use in practice.

A lot of clients say that they just print it out and staple it to the wall next to their computer screen because it’s something you use all the time, and it doesn’t only affect marketing decisions. It also is product development. Now you know what are the things, what are the advantages you have, so in product development, make damn sure you’re not going to let go of those things.

Create a standout message and write down very clearly what you want to communicate with marketing.

It also highlights all the things that don’t make you stand out. Even if you put a lot of resources into those, it’s unlikely to make a big difference to your sales or customer service. Is customer service listed as one of the reasons people hire you? If yes, how? What part of customer service do we want people to believe in and experience? Put the resources on those. Not necessarily on the fastest response, not necessarily the friendliest person, not necessarily the most experienced, whatever specific thing is the thing that makes you stand out, make sure that that’s what you deliver.

I usually do this with the CEO and CMO or marketing team, the highest C-suite, and the people most responsible for those decisions because it guides a lot of it. It essentially tells us this is where people buy from us. That’s what it says. Let’s make people believe these things. They’ll probably buy from us.

Got you. This is quite different from a tagline. For example, Cisco invested a lot of money in creating this tagline, the human network. I don’t know if they still use it, but they used it for a while. They invested a lot of advertising dollars and put that message out there. Still, it wasn’t a standout message from what you described because it didn’t convey something that would be practical or useful for me as the customer. I wouldn’t say, “Wow, because they’re the human network. This is a no-brainer, and I need to hire them.”

Yeah. It didn’t tell you, as the potential customer, anything that would motivate you to buy. It didn’t tell anything that would differentiate them in a good or meaningful way. You can argue that a tagline is not supposed to create this feeling or something. Sure, but you can do more than that. I’m not saying it was necessarily a terrible tagline, but it certainly was missing most of the potential of the tagline.

Just do it. It is, I think, the best tagline in history because it’s clever, memorable, and fun. Assuming you don’t know the history of it, it was the last words of someone before they were executed. That’s where it came from. It conveys a very specific feeling that Nike specifically wants to associate with sports-related top products. But you don’t need to be clever like that. It’s much better that you get something out if we’re going to the tagline; this applies to all marketing. It’s better to be clear and meaningful than clever.

If you want to be artistic, then try poetry or maybe painting, but keep it separate. Always err on the side of clarity over cleverness. Once you’re clear, you can improve it, but with something clever. But if you start discounting the value of clarity, you’re almost always doing it poorly.

How did you find out the history of the just do it tagline?

I’m not sure where I read it. To be clear, I’m not guaranteeing that’s true. It’s maybe a false story, but I’m pretty careful with how I categorize info in my head. If I remember it as a believable thing, I think it was fairly believable when I heard it.

Wow, that’s wild. Give us an example of a standout message. It could be yours, a client’s, or a competitor’s, but it should be exemplary—not like Nike’s tagline, but something that feels doable for us to implement.

All right. It’s hard to give a full example because it’s not just three words. The way that I write it is that it’s three separate points, ideas, or thoughts, basically the three main reasons for people to buy. Not necessarily the main reasons to buy, but what are the most impactful things they could hear first? Usually, it’s two or three sentences per point or thought just to make it clear to us. What is it that we want to get across?

If I simplify my own, I probably shouldn’t, but let’s say I opened this up a little. One point is that I work mostly with marketing professionals or marketing companies because marketing companies don’t hire people who don’t know how to drill down to something very well. If marketing companies need help with their messaging, that also means that no matter what you do and how good you are at marketing, you still have some blind spots.

Focus on the things that will get people’s attention, make them associate the right things with us, and make them notice the differences we want them to notice.

If even big, very good marketing companies recognize they need outside help, it’s a good reason to consider getting that help. If those really good companies, people who do this thing for others, if they hire me, I must know what I’m talking about. That’s one of the things that I like to bring up. I probably shouldn’t say this because it’s like I showed you a magic trick, and now I’m explaining it. It ruins the magic.

No. It’s awesome because what you’ve explained here isn’t just that marketers who are going to potentially hire you to recognize that they have blind spots and that you’re able to show those blind spots to them and help them shore up their offer; their messaging, their positioning, and all that, but you’re also deselecting those prospects who don’t admit they have blind spots and are therefore full of hubris and arrogance. Who wants them as clients anyway?

Another thing that I like to bring up, especially if I talk more about marketing decision-making, which I help a lot of clients with on an ongoing advisory basis, is that I point out that my goal is not to put more on your plate. My goal is to take most of what’s on your plate and take it away because, most likely, 90% of what you’re doing is not essential. I often talk about marketing essentialism, the idea that very few things are truly essential. Everything else is good if you get to it, but you need to get those essential things right. Most of the potential results are in how well you do those essentials.

Before we started, I mentioned that it’s harder to have a conversation about making good marketing decisions, or it ends up being a three-hour conversation every time. But if we had gone there, I would have highlighted all the time that the goal is to make the next action as clear as possible with no distractions. That’s how you get things done. When you get things done, you can see the results.

For example, if you have a problem, let’s say whatever problem you have, some challenges in marketing, and it’s a significant thing, you might be inclined to carefully strategize it, carefully planning exactly the best possible solution. It’s a natural idea to minimize risk because it’s a high-risk thing. That might be a mistake in itself because during those six or nine months, it will take you to create that plan and implement it carefully, slowly, and meticulously, and you’re still experiencing the problem all the time.

An alternative would have been to have an hour-long conversation with me, make a decision by the end of the day, implement it in two weeks, and then see how it works. Implement it in a way that doesn’t fully commit you to it forever. It’s specifically easy to adjust and optimize because the more significant the decision is, the more people have this subconscious thought that the decision is somehow more and more permanent, and the more significant the decision is. In contrast, it should almost go the other way around.

The goal of making good marketing decisions is to make the next action as clear as possible without distractions.

If it’s super significant, you should specifically make a decision that you can improve on because if and when you inevitably, as a human, don’t make the best possible decision every single time. The consistent way of getting good results is to make decisions and implement things in a way that allows you to quickly improve on them. Quickly get the data to see if this is going in the right direction. If not, then make a change.

If you spend nine months, you may have a marginally lower chance of making a poor decision initially. Maybe you don’t; maybe you have a 95% chance of making a good decision instead of a 93% chance of making a good decision, but you’re losing six months or a year.

I love this expression. I don’t remember where I heard it from, but perfect is the enemy of done.

Yes, I use multiple versions of that because I love the saying.

We don’t have to talk for three hours, but I think this is an important topic. By the way, I think there’s a book for you on this. If there isn’t already a book called Marketing Essentialism, it needs to come from you.

I’ve planned that for a few years; I just haven’t written it.

Maybe do some decision-making and just get on with it.

I have, and I’ve always decided it’s not the highest priority.

Okay, I got you. Good. The fallacy, again, to reiterate what you’re saying, is that people think the more significant the decision, the harder it is to extricate yourself from that decision. When you could make it the opposite, you could make more significant decisions easier to extricate yourself from.

I think there’s a bigger conversation to be had about how people make it so that it’s hard for them to admit mistakes. If you form a strong opinion about something, it is generally harder for you to later admit to yourself or others that you were wrong. Whereas if you approach things with, given what we know now, what’s the best thing we can do right now? Just do that and then look at tomorrow again. Given what we now know, what’s the best way to go?

I’m exaggerating maybe with the timeline, but if it is the option of, like, “let’s hire a consulting company to do research for nine months,” then plan a strategy for the next three months, and then we implement it for another two years, then three years go by while we’re trying to solve this problem if the alternative is that in a month we have attempted a perfectly valid, good solution. Then, we can evaluate whether it worked. Did it not? Did it improve? Can we go in the same direction? Do we modify something?

If we do the modification and optimization for three more months, we’ve spent four months and probably have a better solution than what we would have had with three months of planning. I don’t remember where it came from; some famous quote about warfare that ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy.’ It’s the same in marketing. You can have the best plan, but you shouldn’t ever expect it to work as you have planned. In my opinion, every good plan has built-in checks for whether it is working and built-in ways of course correcting when something isn’t working as planned.

I think when I plan marketing strategies or campaigns, I look at how we can build in ways for us to get feedback about why this isn’t working, if and when something isn’t working so that in the middle of the campaign, we’re not going to be blind to, we’re not getting leads. That could be a million things. But if the campaign itself is structured in a way that gives us the feedback that the most likely reason we’re not getting leads is this, then we can quickly pivot. 

I don’t like the word pivot because it’s used so ridiculously, but you get the idea of quickly getting something done and counting on the optimization. Obviously, yes. Do the initial thing well. Don’t hire a random kiddo from school to plan your marketing suddenly because he can do it in an hour. Obviously, you should do it carefully enough, but people discount the value of solving a problem quickly. Looking at did it work; if not, then solve it again. Did it work? Great. Now, let’s move on to the next thing.

It’s way more consistently effective, but it also requires you to be willing to endure the uncertainty that you experienced by making a decision in an hour rather than outsourcing the decision to an expensive consultancy that is going to present you with a PDF nine months later or three months later. That feels safe, but that’s almost guaranteed to be a suboptimal decision. However, if you make a quicker decision, you at least have a chance. However small or big it is, you have a chance to make a very optimal decision.

Making decisions and implementing changes that allow you to improve quickly is the consistent way to get good results.

Was the quote you were trying to think of General George Patton? “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

It might be, but I think there’s another one that is something along the lines of your plan will always fail at the first contact with the enemy. Something along those lines. I never remember how the quotes work. I just remember the idea.

Yeah, awesome. One of my favorite quotes is from the boxer Mike Tyson. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Yeah. That, I think, is a variation of the same. I have used that a few times, too. If we’re using quotes, my favorite is that speed doesn’t matter if you’re going in the wrong direction. I’m misquoting it a little. I think it was Gandhi who said it. Still, it works very well in a lot of marketing and business decisions overall that people are so stuck in this idea of we have this plan that we formed a year ago because usually, we hire some big consultancy to tell us what to do. It’s not working out, but we’re stuck to it now.

Yeah, that’s the concept of sunk cost. You get attached to some investment, even though it was bad, because it makes you feel bad to think you’ve wasted all that money. If we could summarize some of the key actions to take on marketing essentialism and being more willing to make big decisions more efficiently, what would be some next actions for our listeners to take?

I think if you’re thinking of messaging or positioning and such, the one thing to look at is just to be way more critical of how significantly you are standing out with what you’re saying. When people even reach out to me the first time, I check out their website. It is not just occasional; it is quite common that I see a website where I honestly can’t tell if they sell software, bathtubs, or airplanes based on what they’re saying; I only get the idea because of a picture.

The wording they use is truly completely meaningless. They’re saying things like industry-leading development cycles or whatever. It’s these completely meaningless words. That is far more common than you would ever expect: very well-reputable companies that clearly only rely on a massive sales force and their reputation. If you don’t have a massive sales force and a huge, really good reputation, you wouldn’t survive doing that.

Here’s an example. I was just curious to see what the big headline was on Cisco’s homepage. Are you ready for this?

Go on.

See your IT from a better place.

Cisco, if you’re listening, give me a ring. You need it. That’s one thing, just being much more critical of saying fewer things or forcing yourself to write a single headline with the idea that if I can say anything more than this, what do I need to say for people to have some idea of what I do and why they should hire me or buy from me or us rather than anyone else? Just be way more critical of it. If you want to dig deeper into it, then rewind and go through the steps we talked about. There’s a lot to learn by doing those more carefully than people usually do them.

On the decision-making side, I’m sure there are some clever quotes about this, but I would argue that there are words that don’t have a plural, such as data or software and priority. They shouldn’t have a plural. Priorities are a bit of a weird idea. You can’t have a lot of priorities. They’re no longer priorities if you have 78 of them.

I think it was in Gary Keller‘s book The ONE Thing that I learned that the word priority originated without a plural. It was only a priority. This idea of having multiple priorities goes against the original definition of priority, and it’s a pretty recent “innovation.” If everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority.

Even if you just have too many priorities, you’re not going to make efficient progress on any of them. Overall, just getting much more selective of what are the essential things. Ultimately, there are very few essential things. Once you’re clear on what you absolutely must do, the essential things, you must solve these things. Do them, fix them, or whatever, then it’s easy to focus on them. It’s much easier to get them done and then move on to the non-essential things once you get through all the essential things.

We also happen to now talk about the speed of decision-making. There are a dozen other similarly significant things about how to make decisions and what makes you a better leader, but it’s a big one. Just give yourself permission to make a quick decision with the idea that once it’s quickly implemented, you will see how it works. You don’t consider it done; you consider it the first step.

Give yourself permission to be wrong. Without necessarily ever saying that you’re wrong. You can present it to yourself and everyone else as we’re trying this quickly to see if this is a good direction. If it isn’t, then we won’t go there. We’ll test it just quickly with this little limited thing. Even if it goes wrong, it’s a negligible issue.

When I say to solve a problem, I don’t mean to change everything about your business in a week to solve something. No, try it out. You’ll be an infinitely more efficient business or marketing leader by making decisions with that in mind. Some things are hard to test, but still, test even those.

Strive to take the next actionable step with clarity and purpose. Avoid distractions to experience quick, measurable improvement. Share on X

I’m guessing you’re a fan of the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

I haven’t actually read it, but I know the guy. I think I’ve read half of it. I have a problem with finishing books.

Me too. One out of 50 books I’ve finished.

Yeah, me too.

I found out this is totally aside, but I have something called Irlen syndrome, and a lot of people have it. It was discovered by Dr. Helen Irlen. She was a guest on my other podcast, my personal development show, Get Yourself Optimized. What happens is your eyes get tired, and you just get fatigued as you read. She has these color filters that she figures out, and her practitioners figure out which colors to add as filters to your glasses so that you don’t get tired while you’re reading.

All right, interesting.

Yeah. You can get an assessment to see if you have Irlen syndrome and then get the special glasses.

I’ll have to check it out.

Many people get tired as they read, and that’s not normal. It might be normal for many people with Irlen syndrome, but it’s not as things are optimally designed by nature. It’s just a disorder or whatever you want to call it.

If our listener wanted to get more training or just learn more from you on either of these two topics, either messaging or decision making, and that marketing essentialism, do you have a course? You don’t have a book yet, but do you have something they could dive into, maybe a longer video training that you’ve posted to your YouTube channel? Is there a place they can go for the next step if they’re not quite ready to hire you?

I have a video just on my home page. It’s changing pretty soon, but the topic remains mostly the same. I’m not sure when it’s going to change. I’m not sure when you’re posting this; it’s fairly soon, but it’s basically about the common mistakes people make with messaging and how to correct them.

The newer version focuses more on evaluating your messaging and improving it from there. How do you recognize the specific things to improve? Also, both versions talk a little about decision-making, especially the new version, which is probably out by the time this comes out.

I’ll have it on my home page. It should be pretty easy to find.

Yeah, and that’s petersandeen.com?

Yes.

Okay, awesome. If our listeners could glean one more wisdom nugget from you that they haven’t already heard, and it could be anything—it doesn’t have to be marketing-related, even—what would it be?

I didn’t know you would ask that, so I didn’t prep for this. We touched on it, but I think a big part of what slows people down is this idea of avoiding mistakes, looking silly, needing to admit you’re wrong and such. Whether it is about business, marketing, sales, personal things, politics, religion, or whatever, people hold onto their ideas so strongly that it makes it harder for them to improve their opinions.

I try to approach negating some of this tendency in myself by not forming opinions but rather referring to this is what I now know; this is the information I have. Based on that, this is a natural conclusion. If I get new information, it immediately changes the natural conclusion. I don’t even need to worry about it. Well, I was wrong; no, I just didn’t have the info.

I’m sure I’m just as hard-headed as everyone else, if not more, so I try not to form strong opinions about things. Same in marketing. I try not to feel like I know the best way to do something. No, I don’t. I know what makes sense given the information I have about this specific situation, and that’s what I’m going to do or that’s what I’m going to recommend. I can very clearly articulate why because it’s not based on opinion. It’s based on what we know. This is a natural conclusion of what we know.

The faster you recognize mistakes, prepare to change, and optimize based on them, the more consistently you make better decisions.

If you have more info, then tell me, and I’ll filter it down to what I think it means. Rather than seeing it as prescriptive, this person had this opinion, so it must be right. Did they understand your unique situation? Probably not. When they wrote the book where they said that, they weren’t thinking of you specifically.

Admitting that yes, you will be wrong, you’ll make suboptimal decisions, but you’ll anyway make those. No matter how hard you’re trying to avoid them, you will make them. The faster you recognize them and prepare to change and optimize based on them, the more consistently you make better decisions.

I don’t play poker or any other gambling, but poker is a brilliant example of decision-making. The best players are not those who have big egos. Some of the best players have big egos, but that’s certainly not because they are. That’s not the reason for them being good at poker. You cannot win every hand. You don’t go in with the idea that I will play every hand. It’s the idea that you’ll make the best decision for the long term.

It is often admitting that I put this much money there and I should no longer put more. I’ll fold. It’s a better decision to lose what I just did or what I placed in there. The sunk-cost fallacy, but there are many other similar ones.

Essentially, by forming strong opinions, you run a risk of relating your self-worth to the accuracy of those strong opinions. I love this way of stating it. This is from Ephraim Olschewski, a previous guest on the show. He talks about looking good and not looking bad, and that’s a very powerful motivator for many people. I don’t want to have that as a motivator for me to look good and not look bad. I just want to reveal light in everything I do.

That ties him back to what we talked about: the more time and resources you put into a specific project, strategy, or whatever, the harder it is for most people to admit that they need to change something about it. If you spent two weeks planning something and another two weeks implementing it, it’s probably not like you’re very married to it on any emotional level. But if you spend 12 months on it and a massive amount of company money, then it takes much more guts to be like, well, crap, that didn’t work. That’s another reason why I encourage making quicker decisions. Yes, carefully consider, but make them much faster than most bigger companies, especially when making decisions.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Again, your website is petersandeen.com. You are available to consult with our listeners.

Yes.

Awesome. Listener, I hope you take this opportunity to evaluate what you’re up to from a marketing decision-making and messaging perspective and consider hiring Peter. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Critically evaluate and ensure that my messaging is unique. This will help me stand out from my competitors. Ask myself, “If I was a potential customer landing on my pages for the first time, would the messaging compel me to take action?”

Focus on a few key points in my messaging. Sharpen my focus to allow my core message to shine.

Engage with my target customer’s perspective, hopes, fears, and experiences. When I tap into the audience’s deepest motivations, I can share resonant and impactful messaging to address their needs.

Analyze the messages of my direct and indirect competition. Research the alternative options my potential customers may find engaging.

Create a standout message guide to remain consistent in my marketing. Consistently share my key value propositions, no matter the channel or campaign.

Be willing to make quick decisions, implement, and optimize based on results. Analysis paralysis kills marketing momentum. I can always change and tweak my messaging based on real user feedback.

Build in feedback options. Pivot my approach if needed. Construct direct feedback mechanisms in my marketing campaigns and funnels.

Prioritize identifying how my 20% efforts drive 80% of my business impact. I need to laser-focus on the forward progress of these indicators.

Avoid fixating on sunk costs. Remain open to changing my course when warranted. Admit when I need to course-correct rather than throwing more money at futile efforts.

Visit petersandeen.com to tap into Peter Sandeen’s wealth of authentic, results-driven expertise.

About Peter Sandeen

Peter Sandeen is often called the “marketers’ marketer” because more than half of his clients are other marketing experts. They come to him for clarity about what makes them stand out from the competition and what impacts their results the most. Peter’s approach is based on a decade of conversion optimization—looking at what improves your marketing results most consistently.