Barnaby Wynter
SUMMARY
What is a brand?
A brand is a relationship between a buyer and a product or service that is more important to them than their relationship with their money.
How can organizations struggling to fill their pipeline with the right kind of customers and get deals over the line improve their brand?
Organizations should focus on being present in the buyer's stream of consciousness and solving their problem, rather than pushing their own systems and processes onto the market. This can be done by understanding the shift in power to the buyer in the digital economy, and leveraging language and online presence to attract the right kind of customers.
What's wrong with traditional sales and marketing funnels, and how can they be made better?
The problem with traditional sales and marketing funnels is that they are made for media owners, not buyers. Instead, businesses should focus on making a single journey that includes raising awareness, image matching, and engaging with prospects in a way that matches their emotional style to attract the right customers.
How to give customers a great experience after they've bought something?
By keeping the customer at the center of everything, businesses can give customers a great experience after they've bought something. For example, they can use marketing thinking to make the experience of being an owner great, instead of just focusing on making the sale.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
Marcus Cauchi: Hello and welcome to the Inquisitor Podcast. Today my guest is Barnaby Wynter. He's a brand creation expert with over 35 years experience and 570 brands to his name, and he's also founding freeman of the Company of Entrepreneurs. Barnaby, welcome.
Barnaby Wynter: Wow. Hi Marcus. Really glad to be here. Looking forward to it.
What is a brand?
Marcus Cauchi: Thank you. Well, tell me this. What, what is a brand?
Barnaby Wynter: I think it's like already a great. Let's be quite clear about this. There are two words that float around the industry. There's branding and there's brand, and let me be quite clear. Branding is nothing to do with brand, and brand is nothing to do with branding.
Branding is effectively what a lot of people do. They spend a lot of money with designers. They create a logo, they create a look and feel, and they often end up putting lipstick on a pig. And effectively what they're doing is they're wasting their money, kind of tarting up something that isn't really a brand at all.
And then people call that brand. [00:01:00] And often when I ask this from, from, from the stage and I say, what are people, people will say, it's the logo. You're look and feels what people think of you. It's something in the consumer's mind. It's none of those things. So we kind of discovered this in 1999 when I, I became Youngs MD of a top 200 advertising agency.
We had a thing called the brand bucket, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little while. But actually when I asked the board then what a brand was they came up with, we, we filled six sheets of a one, uh, flip chart paper with lots of different answers. And I've got a list of 74 different answer. What a brand is.
So we then went through a definition process, took about three and a half months. So the definition of brand that I have been following now since 1999 is a, we define brand as every experience that affects the relationship between a product or service, and its buyer. Let me just, it might be worth just decanting that out.
A brand can only exist in the mind of a buyer because until you've given up your money or time, and, and money is just a reflection of time. Cause you have to go [00:02:00] and earn it for most people anyway, until you've handed over your time in the form of money to somebody. You don't really have a true sense of what the, what the, the, the brand is.
But the key thing about brand today is it's a relationship that you value more than the relationship you have with the money in your pocket. And then less. So what you have to do is you have to create a, a business system, a business machine, which portrays that sense of relationship at all levels, from top to bottom of the business, from initial engagement to long-term loyalty.
And you portray that in such a way as it always looks like the relationship is worth more than the people's relationships with their money. And then if you get that right, people will give you their money. And that's how effective you, you create commercialized relationships, which is, I think what what selling is about and is, is very different to the way people approach things.
I often find.
Marcus Cauchi: So I, I think part of the problem is that often [00:03:00] organizations fail to have continuity and alignment. Between marketing, sales, customer success. And as a result, every time a customer or a prospect touches the brand for want of a, be a better description, there's inconsistency there. And I think brand is really about the promise as much as about the experience.
And if tho if the promise, if the promised experience isn't what was, uh offered, then that creates a disconnect, and I think that's where you start creating resistance with buyers. And marketing is the prime driver in any organization. Sales is a subset of it, but I, I think the silos that exist in businesses are significant and problematic because, They're all about you internally rather than being focused on the [00:04:00] customer.
What do you have to say to organizations where they're struggling to fill their pipeline with the right kind of customers?
Marcus Cauchi: So what do you have to say to organizations where they're struggling to fill their pipeline with the right kind of customers? Um, they're struggling to get deals over the line because they're spending an awful lot of time trying to convince people instead of attracting the right kind of people through their brand.
Barnaby Wynter: So I think there's a whole language problem that we've got here. And even just listening to you, Marcus says, I can sort of hear, hear a disconnect with the language. The first thing is you don't, you don't get more customers. The use of the word customer is a fundamental floor in most businesses. And I think whenever I work with my clients, I, it's one of the words that I ban and we call it a C word in our business.
We're not actually allowed to use the word. So I don't, I don't tend to use the word. In old days, we used to have a, a, a, a fine box that if anybody used the word, the C word, they had to put 50 P in a box. And every, every Christmas we'd have a great party. There's, there's also an F word as well, so we have an F word and a C word, and uh, so I don't use that word, any word that [00:05:00] assumes you are already in a relationship with somebody.
I will swear momentarily. So that's clients, customers, users, members, you know, all associates, whatever. All of these words assume you are in a relationship with somebody. The moment you do that, your systems and processes are fundamentally flawed. So what happens is there is an, you are, you are assuming you are in a relationship with somebody.
And actually perhaps when I came into industry 30 years ago, when choice was limited, media exposure was limited. It was limited to a few national newspapers and two TV channels. Actually, the power base sat with the, the, the, the, the product owners and the service owners. Now we are in the digital economy and the, and the knowledge economy, the power base is completely shifted to the buyer.
They know more about your business than you do. And you are fussing about building systems and processes that are either easy for you as you mentioned earlier, and make it easy for you [00:06:00] to scale and you to do this, and you to do that. But actually the the buyer is saying, now actually I get to choose whether I use your, your, your business system to solve a problem that I've already identified.
So what happens is, the tie up where most organizations go wrong is they, they try and push out their system and process into a market that doesn't want it, the simply doesn't want it. Whereas actually we wake up in the morning and, and, and, you know, the research is, is, is ever clearer now, but you know, the, the research is telling us even now or prior to, to lockdown, and I think it may have gone up up from this, but 88% of all buying decisions start online.
So what you've gotta do is you've gotta, you've gotta be in the stream of consciousness, that's the knowledge economy. So that when people wake up in the morning and say, do you know what I've got? I've got a bit of a challenge, I've got a problem. I dunno where to stay tonight. I dunno why, where, where the nearest what, where the nearest Italian is.
I dunno what, why I need the new piece of furniture. I, I, I, I want to paint my house. I wanna [00:07:00] go on holiday, whatever. We all go onto Google and start searching on that. If it's a particular product we want them, we probably go straight to Amazon. And we'll start looking at,
Are you talking 88% of all buying decisions or consumer buying decisions?
Marcus Cauchi: Can I just clarify, are you talking 88% of all buying decisions or consumer buying decisions?
Barnaby Wynter: Well, the, the, the, the research is consumer led, of course, on this particular thing. But the, the evidence, if you look at what Gartner are producing right now, the evidence is that that's mirrored at B2B as well. So business to business, and there's a very simple reason for that is because there aren't any businesses.
Everybody keeps talking about this thing called the SME sector. Well, I, I've got some news for you guys. There isn't one, right? There used to be one and there isn't one. If you look at the numbers, there are Nyon 6 million registered business in the uk and the, the shocking statistic of that is that 4.2 million of them have no employees.
And only [00:08:00] 7,250 companies in the whole of the United Kingdom have more than 250 people working in them. And in between there is a few a another million or so that have less than 10 employees, but when you average it out, it works at three employees. And there's possibly only about 200, maybe 220,000 businesses that have between 10 and 250 people.
Now, I'm sorry guys, but you going out and thinking this is B2B. The majority of B2B owners are individuals like you and me, and they're gonna make the same decision about their business is they're gonna make about the car they buy, the furniture they buy, the food they buy, the restaurant, the holiday they go into the, they go onto.
The reality of that is the decision making process is identical. So I'm quite happy to stand by. Okay, if the research is saying that B2C, 88% decisions start online, it wouldn't surprise me if this's damn close to that in B2B as [00:09:00] well because,
Marcus Cauchi: Well you don't, you don't sell to a business, you sell to a human being.
Barnaby Wynter: Correct.
Marcus Cauchi: And we're conscious of emotion. At least 95% of decisions are emotional. And, uh, if you don't recognize that, then no amount of technique, no amount of clever markets.
Barnaby Wynter: Where, where, where'd you get, where'd you get that statistic from then Marcus? Where that, um,
Marcus Cauchi: It's from the research. It's from the research that gap in the Matrix have done.
They've spent the last four years investigating the neuroscience and the biochemical processes people use to make decision.
Barnaby Wynter: The reason why I ask that is it sounds like it's new news. I was trained on a thing called up Gar Uni, uh uh, Unilever Plan for great advertising, and it had two key constraints in it.
All decisions made up of emotional and rational decision making. That has always been true. The brand bucket that we've been using since 1985 to launch over 4,700 [00:10:00] brands, uh, worldwide, starts with an emotional engagement and then kicks into rational. So it has always been true. It's always been true.
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. That is nothing, nothing new under the planet. I mean, you're not 300 million years of evolutionary hardware.
Barnaby Wynter: I think that's right. Yeah. You have to be scared before you start worrying about whether you're gonna run down a hole or climb up a tree if a, if a big animal is attacking you. You know?
So it's gonna be emotional first, I'm afraid. That's the rules. You know? So that's how we are constructed. You know,
Marcus Cauchi: We, we, we buy emotionally, we justify rationally.
Barnaby Wynter: No. Okay. I, I, okay. So I don't think you buy until you've squared the circle between the emotional and irrational. So you you,
Marcus Cauchi: Isn't that what I've just said?
Barnaby Wynter: No, cuz you said, you, you, you, you, you didn't quite say it like that or I didn't hear it like that. So you might, you might have meant that, but that's not what I heard. You said you justify, you justify rationally as if you justify the purchase. [00:11:00] Again, it's a language thing. Of course. It's always a language thing.
If you mean prior to purchase, you justified purchase. Yes. Then I agree. Yeah. Okay.
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. You, unless I bought myself a, an overpriced, uh, convertible. Because I, I liked the button, uh, to start the ignition, and the engine sound was great. Then I spent time justifying the purchase in that. And the idea was that when my clients saw me arrive in this, uh, monster, they'd know that I was successful.
Uh, in three years of owning this money pit, they only saw it once.
Barnaby Wynter: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: One client saw it once.
Barnaby Wynter: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: But I, I've found a way to justify it rationally. I think we, we forget that there is a syntax. I think the way people make decisions, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this, particularly when we're making important decisions, is we make space and the process of dec uh, deciding to buy something happens long before the marketing kicks in and long before our salesperson [00:12:00] turns out. Then you start to look passively and you start to spot the car or you start
seeing white papers and books and you, you know, you might consume some content. When the problem starts to grow, then you start to look actively, and then you start to compare and contrast and you make trade offs between the different options. And certainly consumers are doing this when they're going on Google.
They're doing price comparisons, feature to comparisons and stolen. they're looking at reviews and then they make the decision once they've made those trade offs and then they use the product. And if the product delivers what they've expected, they continue to rent that outcome. And you don't keep customers for life unless you continuously listening to what they're saying.
You are co-developing the product and services with them, and then it becomes habit but that syntax is something that [00:13:00] most sales and marketing, uh, people forget or don't realize.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And the net result of that is it might sell them something which, um, may appear on the surface to be right, but often it disappoints.
And so it's only a matter of time before you're fired.
Barnaby Wynter: So the, the, the problem bucket model was, was develop to exactly map that journey. It's slightly different to the way you've described it, and certainly what we are putting into practice right now for, for major corporates and, and, and, and startups as, as at the same time follows a slightly different stepping stone approach to the one you've described, but it includes all the things that you are talking about.
And so the six steps that we,
Marcus Cauchi: Can you talk us through it?
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah, of course, of course.
The problem bucket model
Barnaby Wynter: So the basic premise is, I will use this word only once, cuz obviously it's, the swear word is the F word right there. A lot of, a lot of processes that are, that are driven, are driven by a thing called a funnel, a sales funnel, or a marketing funnel.
Marcus Cauchi: Mm.
Barnaby Wynter: Which is why it's an F word, because we are not, I'm [00:14:00] not allowed to use that word, because the problem with that particular mindset is it's designed for the media owners. It's designed for the people getting the messages in the sense that they want to pour your money into the top of the, of the hopper.
I'm gonna use the hopper as an alternative worker. I've found that as an alternative fund, I don't have to pay a fine for U, not using the F word. , and then they, they let it all pour out all over the floor because that's your job to sort that out. And that's, that's, that's led to this exactly what you were talking about, this disconnect between, uh, pre-sales, sales and after sales.
Right. Nonsense. All complete nonsense. Right. There's, there's one journey. So the one journey is defined in the following way, and this was a result of a 18 month piece of research by gentleman called Stuart Bull, who ran a, a top 40 advertising agency and a, a team of of planners, uh, there when they were commissioned by SARB to map how people bought Motorcars.
And the, the journey goes as far us, the first thing you've gotta do is you've gotta raise awareness of your particular product or service in the [00:15:00] marketplace. And there's techniques for doing that. And this is where branding may has a, have a role because you've gotta have nice logo and brand properties and various other things.
If you just raise awareness, if you just tell everybody you are there, what people say is they say, I've heard of you, and you go, fantastic. And they go, well, I've heard of you. And you go, that's brilliant. Well, I've heard of you. You know, so, so what? So actually raising awareness in its own right is not enough.
The next step you is to have to do what we call image match Now, image match is where you need to match to the image of the prospect. This is how we replace the C word that I was talking about earlier. We only talk about prospects, prospect thinking throughout your business when it comes to selling, sales, marketing, whatever.
You should be always thinking about the prospect. The prospect is somebody who wished you didn't exist. They wish they could get on with their life without you blighting their life with your amazing solution to a problem they never even knew they had. Right? They don't want you there. They've scrubbed you out.
So image match is all about matching to [00:16:00] the image of your prospect because of course we buy from people we like, right? But we did some research in 2005 where we thought something had changed because of the onset of the digital economy. We were four, five years into the internet taking a hold and we, we wanted to see what, whether that had changed anything, and we learned something really, really important.
that we found that people didn't just buy from people they liked, they buy from people who were like them. That changed the dimension of image match because what we have to do now is we have to engage with people who are heading towards us emotionally in their style. And the problem with most salespeople is they try and they have their own style, their selling style, they use their corporate style and actually then they're running a real risk of me sitting there going, Oh I like your style.
I don't like the way you do things I don't like, because actually I want to buy from an organizer that's in my. So, cause when we go into the big, [00:17:00] massive field of choice that is the interweb, right? We look and we go, oh, oh, they've got red. I would never buy anything I, from a company that has read in it.
There's just, I wouldn't, because I'm a Chelsea fan, it's just not, it's not gonna happen, right? Just forget it. If you got read now, I don't care how good you are, you got read in it or I don't like your language, or I don't. Style or, or imagery or, or all that sort of thing. You've got to be in the style of the prospects.
So the first steps raise awareness. The second step is image. Image match. So I've heard of you. I'm familiar with you, and I like you because you're like me. There are purely emotional steps. Now I have come into the market with a known problem. So where I think is slightly different, I don't think. So I'm looking for help.
I'm looking for assistance. And this is where, where the challenger sale was a sh a ground shifting, uh, book when it came out. The work from CEB Chief Executive Bureau in in America, the Challenger Sale said actually what you've gotta do is you've gotta start to flood [00:18:00] the market with insight at this stage and demonstrate that you are a
subject matter expertise. And that exists both at personal brand level and at corporate brand level. You've gotta demonstrate that you know your onions. And if you want to develop a personal brand, you've gotta become the expert in something and then really portray that at Image Match to say, look, let me show you how I'm an expert in this, or I'm an expert in that, or I'm an or.
Let me help you. What are you looking to achieve? Right? Okay. Have you thought of this? Have you done that? Have you looked at these areas? And you've gotta behave as an expert would in an independent way and show that. Now of course they're gonna like you for that, and then they're gonna go, I like the way they help me.
They like, so that's the first two steps. So you've engaged them emotionally. If you get this right, they're gonna say, so what is it you actually do? Because they know you've, they found you in because they've been looking for a problem and you've been really helpful. And they go, so what is it you actually do?
And you go, well, uh, what we do, and this is where salespeople go [00:19:00] crazy again, they list out features, features, features, features. They lined you with all that. We do this and it does that, and it twists like this, and it goes faster like that, and it uses less fuel like this. And you go, no, no, no, no, no. I, I think you've misunderstood my question.
I asked you what you do, and I said, and the salespeople just look at you and go, well, yeah, I'm telling you what we do. We are really brilliant at this, and we're great at this, and we've been doing it for years, and we've got loads of lawyers and we've got loads of accountants, and we, we do this and we do, you know, and you go, no, no.
So, and then, Then they go, well, What salespeople do is they start us asking questions. They go, well, what about this? They're looking for the opportunity, and in the end you just get bored. You just go, oh, I'm, I haven't got time for this. I'm sorry.
Marcus Cauchi: It's like doing photos of your ugly children to strangers and wondering why they don't get
Barnaby Wynter: Correct. Exactly, and, and they, because the question is misunderstood. The questions that's actually being asked at this .Third stage, which we call facts match, which is where the [00:20:00] buyer has, has found you. They came into the market with a problem, they found you. They kind of like the cut of your jib. They think they're your style, and they then ask you what you do.
What they're actually asking is, what do you do for me? And of course you need to be able to answer that. Well, actually, if you come with us. We're gonna give you this. We're gonna give you that. You're gonna get this the way we're gonna change your life. We're gonna do the, here are all the benefits of working.
One of the fundamental problems that most, most businesses have is they can't even express the benefits of the work they do. They really just can't do that. It's very frustrating. And that's because they haven't done a really fundamental thing, which is define their value proposition. So that's the third step.
So I've now found you, I'm familiar with you. I like a cut of your jib, and I've asked you what you do for me, and you've answered the question. At this point, we found in the, the research is people go, that's brilliant. I've got all the information I require when I need somebody like you. I'll come back [00:21:00] now the salespeople then go, okay.
When can I come back? Can I ring you tomorrow? Can I come round tonight? Can I ring you next week? Can I put in a thing in the diary? And you go, actually, no, no, because they don't mean I'm ready to buy and I'm just, just need to go and get the money out the bank. What they mean is you are not the only one and they know you are not the only one.
And if you've done your, your features thing really well, that you've given them an amazing way to go and buy from your competition because they've got a nice long list of saying, well, I definitely need all of these things. And so they ring the next person. They go, so what are you looking for? And they go, well, I'm looking for all these things.
And they go, oh yeah, we can do all of that. And by the way, we give you a bunch of daffodils at the end and they go, oh, the other people didn't offer me a bunch of daffodils. I kind of, well, for the same money I get, I don't really mean a bunch of daffodils, but actually you are giving me a bunch of, and you lose the sale cause you train them to buy from your competition.
Whereas if you communicated your benefits, then actually what people say as they go away and they [00:22:00] the choice, but the point is they disappear. Now the, the sales people and the marketing people and the media people, they, they love all this because what they want to do is they go, I know what you've gotta do is you've gotta keep selling, you've gotta keep advertising.
You've gotta keep SEOing, you've gotta keep paper clicking. You've gotta keep doing, you've gotta keep blasting the world. Because if they suddenly decide to come back and you are not there anymore, then you're gonna come and buy from you. This is a fraud. It's a fraud of the broadcast industry. Which is not unu un un, like unusually on its knees. Tv,
soft as it ever at the moment, we've got rubbish TV ads because the people are using TV now. Haven't learned yet. That doesn't work. If you watch peak time tv, now you're watching what we used to call daytime ads on peak time. All the big brands have all disappeared.
Marcus Cauchi: Back in the 1950s, all the Madison Avenue ad agency had psychologists who drove the advertising.
Barnaby Wynter: Correct.
Now it's being driven by a bunch of fluffy loves who, uh, focused on creative cuz they wanna win a bloody award
Marcus Cauchi: And that's what made it interesting. Now it's [00:23:00] being driven by a bunch of fluffy loves who, uh, focused on creative cuz they wanna win a bloody award.
Barnaby Wynter: Actually, I think, or, well, I hope nothing that I see on television ever wins an award because I think, I, I, no,
Marcus Cauchi: I agree.
Barnaby Wynter: No, I think, I think it's being run by strategy, strategy people now, and people who just, who actually don't understand what advertising is about anymore. Because advertising was always an inbound mechanic. It was a way of broadcasting, it was creating desire for things. People are not creating desire by telling you lawyers for you or you know you're gonna, and, and, and whatever.
It's just, it's just awful at the moment. Uh, you are right. Yeah. There, there are still these crazy creative things where people try and make themselves famous. But they're, they're being done by kids that have just come out of art school, who have got a job in a big advertising agency and watch a lot of YouTube knowing that their, neither their client nor their bosses do.
Because unfortunately, if you subscribe to the best YouTube videos, I guarantee [00:24:00] that within four months they appear as television ads. You know, ever thus, these young kids are watching YouTube and they go, oh, we've got this brief and that that will work for this brief. And then they go and present it and then we go, that's really clever.
And then they go and copy somebody who spent hours putting yellow stickies across a wall or something, or every single ad I see. Which I think, oh, that's quite good. I'd just go onto YouTube and find the original YouTube ad, uh, YouTube film that some body in Asia's done or something like that, you know, it's, they're all copies, there's no originality there.
It's shocking. Shocking. And then they go and winning awards with it. And you think, really? Really? Come on guys. You are some old duffers there really dunno what you're talking about anymore. It's really, and it's why advertising has become irrelevant now in the grand scheme of things. So, We're at the stage where people have gone away.
They said, I've, I've got all the information. Right. They're gonna go check out the market. They're gonna check out whether you are the best on it. What you need to do at that point though, is a very specific thing, and this is where, where, where the, the buying process, in my opinion, is fundamentally you have to give people a test drive.
So they've [00:25:00] now got all the information and you just say, they say, oh, that sounds exactly like what I want. Fantastic. Would you like to have a go? And where I would be, what I would be doing now as a business is I would be investing all the money that I used to spend on advertising and paper click on an amazing test drive.
Um, and now you can see where this comes outta the car industry because of course if you gotta buy a car, you kind of take it for a drive down the road, but you don't take it for a drive down the road to see if it's got five wheels, you know, the four on the outside and the one you use to steer it, or whether the the blinker makes a noise or whatever.
You take it to sort of imagine what it would be like to be the owner of that car. To see if you've, if it fits your style, it's kind of comfortable and it's, you know, the dashboard and it, it just, the atmosphere of the car and everything. That's what you're testing. So what you have to do now, whatever you are selling, whether it's a product or service or indeed yourself, you've got to give people the ability to have a go.
Response
Barnaby Wynter: And we call this response. So in other words, you, what you're trying to [00:26:00] do is elicit a response from the prospect to say, actually this really does work for me. Yeah, I really like this. And you go, fantastic. Take it away for the weekend. Go for away for the weekend and try it out. Test drive it. Go on off your car.
Marcus Cauchi: It's the old puppy dog clothes.
Barnaby Wynter: Of course it's of course it's take it off, right? And then they go, yeah, great. And then I'll see you Sunday night and you go up, turn up Sunday night, you say, right. I've come to collect the, uh, I've come to collect the car. Well, no, you can't have it back. Why not? Well, because I've, I've promised, I promised my parents that I'm gonna go up to the, to, to see them in, in it, and I go, well, sorry, we've gotta take it back.
And you can do this with any products or service. And you say, well, we, you know, we're not a charity, we're not a not-for-profit. We're not a a, a social enterprise. We're not a fourth sector, you know, B Corp company, you know, I'm sorry, we have to take, take the product back. And they go, you can't do that.
That's ridiculous. And you go, oh, I'm sorry. I, they were not in business to, to, to, to give this to you. And, you know, I, I really don't know. Well, how do we solve this problem? I said, well, I don't really know, [00:27:00] you know, can't keep it. Oh, actually I do have one idea. And they go, well, what is it? What is it? They said, well, you give us money and you can keep it.
They go, ok. They don't even ask the price, if you've got this right. They just say, yeah, of course, of course. Because I've now integrated it into the way I do things. Now at that point, marketing people, uh, salespeople, they go, fantastic. Took the suspect, turned them into a prospect, took them from from cold to warm to hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.
And now they've been converted into a sale. Just hand them over to after sales, right? And they, they go off for lunch. Well, of course, what we found is this is where the, the tire really hits the road because people hand over their money and now they've absolutely qualified their expectations, their anticipations, the promise, everything that you, you mentioned earlier, Marcus, they've qualified all that.
So at this point, this is where you really need to apply marketing thinking, cuz you've gotta make the experience [00:28:00] of being an owner, amazing, whatever it is. And there isn't a single thing you can't do that. And we call this usage and you know, the way I demonstrate this is often is I show, I I get out, uh uh, the, the box that an Apple iPhone comes in.
And I asked an audience, you know, how many of you have got an Apple iPhone? Stick their hands up. Keep your hands up if you've still got the box right And then all the hands stay up. And I go, well why, why have you still got the box? And they go, oh, I need, some people say, oh, I might sell it. Oh really? Yeah, I want it in its original box.
Right. Okay. When you sell it, it's gonna be pretty trash, doesn't it? So putting in what, and the reason why they keep it is cause the box is beautiful. Be is amazing. It that opens in a certain way and there's a, there's a story behind that as well. About allegedly Steve Jobs rejecting the first iPhone three in its box cuz he didn't like the box and they had to go and design the box before he would, he would look at the prototype of the working and iPhones, well,
Marcus Cauchi: Everything down to the cellophane and the sounding everything.
And the pop when you open the box, everything [00:29:00] about it, everything through. If you keep the prospect or the customer at the heart of everything that you do, if you don't, then there is a disconnect. The, uh, the experience for them
fall down and crumble. And that's where things, salespeople, I make sure that after they've made the sale, the, sorry, after the transaction has happened, they are involved in the whole handover to the, uh, customer experience. Or to the, uh, the post sales piece and that they maintain that contact and conversation with them because I don't believe the sale is over until the customer comes back to you weeks or months or even years later and says, Baraby.
You know, initially we had all that choice and whatever, and, but I'm so glad we decided to go with you. Fantastic decision. Best decision I've ever made. I'm delighted. That's when the sale is complete. I I transaction's over [00:30:00] when the money moves into your account, but the sale isn't complete till then.
Barnaby Wynter: I absolutely agree with that.
Now, it's interesting. You've been swearing at me so regularly with the C word, so I'm gonna give you something else to use instead of the C word because you're right. Once the transaction's taken place, you can't really call them a prospect anymore because they've given you the money for the thing they're now using.
Using your product or service at at usage level. You've made that amazing. We grappled with, with other C words, like consumer and things like that to try and get that around. And then we did, we did a piece of work. It must be about 11 years ago now to say, what, what should we, what, what, how do we describe the people who've now bought from you?
And we can't use the C word cuz it was a, it was a, it was a struggle cuz what, what do you call them? And you, you, you'll be fascinated that we spent another three months coming up with the following phrase and we now talk about everybody post-purchase as a paying prospects. Now there's a reason for that and I did psychology as a degree, so you'll, [00:31:00] you'll, you'll understand what I am in neuroscience, trying to ensure that companies recognize that in spite of the fact that people are using your product or service, that they are paying you money, right?
They are still susceptible to better deals. And so everybody else is treating them as a prospect, and you are treating them as the C word. And what the C word normally means is it means minimum intervention, maximum profit. The bean counter sit there, don't give stuff to the people who are giving us money because every time you do that, that costs us money and it erodes the profit margins.
Mm-hmm.
Mindset in post-purchase
Barnaby Wynter: So the mindset in post-purchase in most organizations I go into is minimum intervention maximum profit. And I have a real problem with that because this is where the tariffs hit the road. This is where people have handed over money. This is where their expectations must be exceeded all the time. And the way we, we embed this in the companies we work [00:32:00] with is we create a culture of saying, you are dealing with paying prospects, so you've gotta give
the same insights that you are feeding out of the top of the bucket to capture people who are heading towards you. Give them to your buyers first. Give them the tips. Ring them up, ask them, and you know, there's all this. When was the last time you rang your top 10 customers? And ask them how they were.
Don't try and sell them anything. Don't ring them up. So we've got a new product. You just ring them up and say how things go. It's been a tough. How are you doing all this sort of thing, just so that they sound like they're on your agenda, that you're being looked after, you know so few people.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. That's a hate crime.
Barnaby Wynter: A hate crime. Why is that a hate crime?
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. How are you today?
Barnaby Wynter: No, no, no. That's not that. No, I didn't. Okay, so I didn't mean that. How are you, today's a precursor to a sales call, right? That's not what I mean.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah, yeah. No, but, but it's, it's the equivalent of a hate crime phoning up and just catching. Why would you bother them?[00:33:00]
Uh, yeah, because it's important that you're bringing value.
Barnaby Wynter: Okay. The value is that I'm thinking of you. Yeah. You are one of our, our top paying prospects. We're just checking. Everything's going okay. Things are okay with you. Is the product delivering what we want? Is the service to doing? Is there anything that's not firing on us?
Is what what you are doing is you're demonstrating care.
Marcus Cauchi: That I accept. Okay. But the problem is the way it's executed normally. Yeah, I get that. I'm just, I'm just phoning to find out how you're getting on. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And that's disingenuous because it isn't about interest in the paying prospect. No. No.
Barnaby Wynter: And actually, that's why I was saying that you should use the insight that you are developing at the top of the bucket.
You ring them up and say, look, I know we haven't spoke for a while, but we've, we've just published a new paper or we've, we've, we've come up a new way of using our product or something like that. And we just wanted to let you know, because you are one of our regular customers, we wanted you to be, have a heads headstart on that.
Over and above. You'll suddenly see in our [00:34:00] marketing communication that we're saying, we've got a new one of these or another of that, or it does this or something like, so that's where you add the value. I agree. Yeah. I, I agree. It's value, but. And so, yes, you are absolutely right. It should, the call should be an added value call, but it may be just, I, I, I, I'm afraid.
I, I, I do find that if I ring people up, as I was thinking of you today, I was just thinking, actually, I have a thing called a lucky bucket, which sounds ridiculous, and it's just here on my desk and all the business cards that I collect, I put in the lucky bucket, and when I've got five minutes, I just grab one out at random and I ring the number on it and I go, hi, blah, blah, blah.
And they go, oh, was, and you know what? People often say if, if I'm not in a, in a commercial relationship with them, they say, well, I was thinking about you the other day. I was go, oh, okay, what were you thinking about? And of course they weren't, of course. It's just a British way of saying, of saying, oh, you know, thanks for calling.
And I say, I pulled your card outta my lucky bucket. And they go, oh, what's the lucky bucket? And then we talk about that. And before you know it, you're in a little nice little chat and they go, oh, actually, do you know what, I was talking to Fred the other day and, and he, he needs somebody like you. Maybe [00:35:00] I'll, I'll connect you or whatever.
So it's kind of a cool way, but that's a usage. Make the experience absolutely amazing. Post-purchase. Treat the buyers as paying prospects. The only difference between them before they bought 'em, after they bought is that they're buying. They're paying for the services or products that you've got. Treat them in mindset terms as a prospect at all times that you, you are excited, you're energetic, you're always enthusi. And if you get that right, you then create what's the final step in the brand bucket, which is the bottom of the bucket, which we call loyalty and no so few marketing plans that I, I get to see, have anything to about loyalty on them at all.
And that's the way you create. It's madness isn't, it's complete madness cuz it's where all the value is in your business. They're the ones that are paying the mortgages and the staff costs and the overheads and all that sort of thing. And indeed contributing profits and nobody looks after them. Now there's two reasons for looking after them.
First of all, [00:36:00] if you've got an ongoing relationship with them, which is full of added value and they're keeping looking after, they might just spend more money with you. Funny that. Because they can't be bothered to go through these blooming six steps again with somebody else cuz it's hard graft. Right? And secondly, you become part of their image dimensions.
They become defined by the fact that they use your products and service with whom they have a great relationship. So they will become your advocates and start finding new people and recommending people to come in at the top of your bucket again. So the six steps are awareness; leads, have I heard of you; image match, I like you because you're like me; facts match, I know what you are gonna give me; response, what's the test drive? Can I have a go Immerse people in your value proposition?; Then the purchase takes place. Then what you do is you make the the purchase amazing through usage and then loyalty. So awareness, image, match, facts match, response, usage, loyalty.
They're the six steps. Now I can tell [00:37:00] you that we've been applying that model to thousands and thousands of brands for the last 35 years.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay. That's been really insightful. Thank you for that. And uh, actually, surprisingly, we're in violent agreement about pretty much everything.
Barnaby Wynter: Yes, I know. But we,
Marcus Cauchi: I'd like to take the conversation to another, uh, area.
Barnaby Wynter: Of course,
How to build a really powerful personal brand?
Marcus Cauchi: I See so many people trying to create a presence on social service because they don't appear to stand for anything. They do more harm than good because of the message they convey their behavior. So can we spend a few minutes talking about how to build a really powerful personal brand?
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah. So the way you produ that, that you build any the the one single foundation stone that every single brand should have is a value proposition.
Now we have a very clear methodology, again, developed over the last 30 years for developing a [00:38:00] value proposition. Again, it has, it has four value sets within it, and the value sets go as follows. You have to define your behavioral values. I'll bring, begin with B. Behavioral values. So what's your style? You have to define what your benefits are, what the benefits are that you, you provide people, and then what you need to
provide is what you want people to believe about you after they have interacted with you or bought your product or service. And that's a, that's inspired by Stephen Covey's second rule seven habits of highly effective people begin with the end in mind. All marketing must begin with the end in mind. You must know why you are looking at piece of creative work and what it's meant to do and what it's meant to achieve.
Too often people don't even do that. It's crazy. And then finally, what do you want to be famous for? So you a, a single statement of intent, a differentiator, or whatever. Now we create that as a, as a tool. It's called a brand galvanizer, galvanizes all the values. And you, [00:39:00] you combine all the values. At a personal brand level, it's no different.
You're still gonna have a style. You should be clear about what your style is. And the best way to do that is ask other people what they think your style is. You. You are gonna have a view that you have a style and other people are gonna see it quite differently. So define that. And then what you do is you make all of your marketing in that style.
Because then people who are drawn to that will have the same style values as you. So when you meet them, you'll feel immediately like you, you've known each other for years because you've got exactly the same style value set. What you must then be clear on is what, how you benefit people Now as an individual at a personal brand level. The benefit that you provide people is your experience. Your lens on the world. It is unique.
It's entirely unique, your lens on the world. It doesn't matter who you are, what you are, where you come from, uh, what your upbringing is, what your education [00:40:00] level is, you will have a unique lens on the world around us. So what you've gotta do is you've gotta really understand what that uniqueness is, what made you who you are and what you are an expert in.
And if you are not an expert in anything, please don't blight me with your personal brand. I'm not interested, right? So, um, I just don't want you anywhere near my world cuz you are cluttering up my world with rubbish noise where you have no expertise in anything. Reading one book and pretending you know what's in the book is not, does not make you an expert.
You've gotta have tried it. You've gotta experienced it. I'm sorry. Uh, you know, it's just ridiculous. I, I'm on the speaker circuit and I often see speakers and they have nothing behind their keynote whatsoever. Nothing at all. They've read it, they've had a view, and they go out and they pretend to be an expert.
That is not simply not good enough. I'm sorry. So what you gonna do is you
Marcus Cauchi: Oh, they were lucky once.
Barnaby Wynter: [00:41:00] Oh yeah. They were lucky once and then I did know, I did know
Marcus Cauchi: Then write
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah. And they, they didn't know how they got there. There's lots of people like that said, I made, I happened to be in the room when the company got sold and I made millions and that makes me good a, a good investor.
What? I worked with a very famous footballer who said I was captain of England and therefore I know how to run a business. And I went, okay, you're gonna have to talk me through that because you are talking dribble in these meetings when it comes to business. And we were trying to do a business venture together and we just argued all the time.
And he was a very famous footballer and had indeed been captain of England. But he knew nothing about business. Just because he knew how to leadership on a football pitch doesn't mean he knows how to do leadership of people in business. It was just nonsense. Now everybody's an expert in something. Might be you can strip down a motorcycle or you know how to cook or, you know, so, so start them and, and focus on your expertise.
So now we know you can bring expertise to my world where I don't have that expertise. And if I'm looking for help [00:42:00] in that area and you demonstrate you're an expert in that area, and you do it in a style that's in my style, we are gonna start cooking with gas. And then what you need to be doing is, is, is then really presenting your self
everything you do, your literature, your website, whatever, whatever the tools are that you are using to present yourself in the market. They've got to be in your style. And so that actually what happens is people like that style and when they come to you, they like you because you are like them, and your sales becomes easy, or selling becomes easy doing that.
And then finally build a system and a process around your ability to deliver your expertise. So create a product, create a service, create a something I can buy from you. I'm not just gonna buy from you cuz you are you and you are an expert. Give me a way of buying. So begin with the end in mind. In the end, you've gotta have a business plan.
And you know, if you're gonna sell your services as a, as a training or horse, or you're gonna come and [00:43:00] do the work and be a practitioner or whatever it is, you must define all that. So the personal brand is, it's got, it's, you've gotta have a product or service to sell. You've gotta absolutely be clear on what your, your expertise is and then present that authentically, insightfully, in a style that's your style so that people, people love you when they meet you.
I hope that that kind of sums it up.
Marcus Cauchi: That's very helpful. Excellent.
Opinions about selling and salespeople
Marcus Cauchi: Okay, so I know that we promised that we'd have a fight, so let's finish on that. You've obviously got some fairly strong opinions about selling and salespeople. Do you mind sharing those with the audience and then, uh, we, we can see where we disagree.
So far, I found pretty much everything that you said. Yeah, rebel.
Barnaby Wynter: Let me try and remove nuance then, because I think, I think you're right. Language nuance, things have evolved. If, listen, if you are successful today as a a sales [00:44:00] person, then the chances are you understand that it's about building, nurture relationships. And it isn't just about the deal.
The problem I have with the majority of sales is the strategy behind sales seems to be entirely outbound, and yet the world of buying is entirely inbound. And disconnect straight there. Sales is about hitting the phones. It's a numbers game. Um, it's about problem solution selling. It's very transactional. When you look, there are very few universities run pure sales courses, but there are lots of universities that run marketing courses.
So the people who come into sales tend to be the people who are less qualified. They, they've worked at phones for you in the sales department and then some have got good at it and now they're salespeople. They have never learned the foundations. They claim to listen, but the only thing they listen for is an opportunity to sell the product that they've got in their back there.[00:45:00]
They, uh, never hear what the prospect is saying. So they listen, but they never hear. They're all about the features. Some have learned FAB features, advantages, benefits. What the difference between advantages and benefits is those ne I've never understood, so only salespeople can explain to that. And they're very, very focused on, on price and product, and so they're looking for deals
all of the time. That's not how we buy. The, the way we perceive value today is fundamentally different. We perceive value from, uh, service quality and ease of buying. And salespeople do not make it easy to buy. Whereas I think marketing people, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're all about inbound.
They're all about insight. Making sense is about engagement. I think my experience has been that, that marketing people tend to be more qualified. That doesn't mean you can't, can't take the same route as you would with, with salespeople. They often, a, a degree level marketing people are about enhancing the quality of people's lives that I think they, they, [00:46:00] they're instinctively hear what people are saying, cuz it, it's, it's a bit, and they, they constantly talk about the benefits and the value coming from business.
And I think these two tribes are entirely different. In a modern day, the buyer has all the power. They are looking for solutions. They already know their problem. I don't need to be told what problem I've got. I know it already. I've checked it out online. If you have a any kind of challenge, issue, problem, and you type it into to Google and nothing comes up on the page, you need to go and see a doctor cuz you are the only person in the world that's got it.
Because most problems you type in will yield thousands if not millions of results. By the time I'm 20 minutes into my problem, I've got solutions, I've got choices, I've got options, I've got all this thing and people, people just raking into my world and trying to sell me something. [00:47:00] And you're right, the the any phone call that you pick up if it gets past your CPS service. And they say how is that Barnaby Wynter, how are you today? I put the phone down. Yeah. Straight away because I know that's the script. It's scripts.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. I agree and accept that that is not selling. That is frankly piss poor. And at best it's an attempt to be transactional. It's selfish and it's not. It's not professional selling. That's ran--, order taking, zookeeping, interruptive, and unwelcome. I grant you that there are not many courses now that are professional sales, but there are plenty of universities now that are starting to develop sales degrees, Harvard included. That's changing. And in fact, I'm starting a movement called Sales of Force [00:48:00] for Good because I agree with you.
That sales has earned the pariah status that it justifiably deserves because it's not about service. It's not about helping the customers solve their problems. Now, the one thing I would take issue with is that often buyers, when they recognize they have a problem, are recognizing the symptoms not the cause, and it's really important that you get to identify the cause so you can solve the problem at source.
And that's where many great salespeople are fantastic diagnosticians and help the customer, sorry, the paying future prospect to identify what the real problem is. Because in my experience selling for 35 years, almost never has a prospect come to me with the real problem. And they, they, they experience all these different symptoms.
But unless you get to the root cause, you are never going to make [00:49:00] the problem go away forever. And you need to partner with your customer, your prospect, in order to be able to help them not only diagnose the root cause of the problem, but then co-develop the solution with them. And that's what great salespeople do.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah, I
Marcus Cauchi: Great sales people work for them.
Barnaby Wynter: I think the marketing strategy to do that is to help people make sense of their problem using insight. All we are talking about now is the same strategy, but one's delivered one to one by a human being and one to one, and the other one is delivered through, through system, the marketing system.
Marcus Cauchi: This is where I have a real problem with the marketing, uh, profession because, uh, certainly in tech, you go on to virtually any technology website, any collateral that they produce is just feature, feature, feature.
Barnaby Wynter: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: They may talk about benefits, but in the fairness, when a vendor of any description talks about the benefit that they're offering, it sounds just like everybody else's benefit in their space.
Barnaby Wynter: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: So you don't [00:50:00] differentiate through features and benefits. What you need to understand is that customers actually rent the outcome. So if you don't understand the outcome that they're trying to address and you don't understand the question that they are trying to answer, then odds are you are just going to be another bit player and a bit of noise, and this is hard.
This is really difficult work. Getting right down to the root cause of their problem. Identifying the better future, the outcome. Where they are on the scale of 0 to 10 in terms of what it's like to be at the bottom, middle and top end of that scale will help you to understand the journey that they have to go through to achieve their design outcome.
And if you're asking the wrong questions, and this is where salespeople really need to up their game, cuz most of them ask bland vanilla questions intended to get the, uh, the prospect on rails. To drive them down that funnel. [00:51:00] And no one likes to be sold like that. Most people find it offensive.
Barnaby Wynter: It is offensive.
Marcus Cauchi: And so what we have to do is we have to work with them. We need to get their fingerprints all over the, uh, solution as well. That's part of what the test drive is.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah, but, but
Marcus Cauchi: The test drive
Barnaby Wynter: Ab absolutely.
Marcus Cauchi: Sorry, go on.
Barnaby Wynter: The problem is I is, is in the word sales. I think what people who are responsible for generating business in an organization should be called help to buyers.
They should be people who help people to buy. So you are absolutely right. People who sell the most stuff. So this is about selling. I have no issue with selling, it's just the concept of sales. Cuz sales sounds like an outbound thing. I've got this product in the back of my car, I've got it in the warehouse.
I've got this service back at the ranch on the computer, and I have to sell that to, and that's my, and my job is to, I sell in sales to sell [00:52:00] it to you whether you want it or not. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create an environment, whether you like it or not. To make sure that my, my thing that I've got in the back of the car, back of the van is something that you are going to give me money for and I can go away.
Marcus Cauchi: A, again, the root causes of that culture are further up the, uh, the food chain.
Barnaby Wynter: Very much.
Marcus Cauchi: It's often down to how a company is structured, correct. How people are compensated, what people are measured on. The investors very often come in and they're focused on growth at any cost. In the car industry, it's metal engine price.
That's how salespeople typically sell that stuff.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: But actually, if you are a woman, typically you're a few inches shorter than the average man. Yeah. And, uh, what you want is visibility so that you can quite comfortably reverse park, uh, you know, scraping the, uh, the hubcaps or, uh, crashing into the car.
And the problem is that most designers, most engineers [00:53:00] don't take that, uh, women into account.
Barnaby Wynter: Right.
Marcus Cauchi: Which is why very often, you get these stereotypes. You get 40% of all complaints tickets raised to help this are caused because engineers designed the product. And so we need to, we need to start asking more sensible, intelligent questions about what the causes are of driving these terrible behaviors.
And I've gotta be honest, the marketing profession has a lot to answer for. Again, I'm not looking for a spat here, but a lot of marketing is just crap. We've already talked about advertising being just dull, and I can point this. 265 billion a year is spent on digital adverts, uh, that's 4.2 quadrillion adverts that get one click or less every single year.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: So they're missing mark.
Barnaby Wynter: You're right. So where's the root cause for that? I think, I think first of all, uh, the marketing industry has, has done itself no favors by becoming executional. It [00:54:00] can only survive by being executional. There was once a, a huge advertising agency world. The, the, the industry I joined when I first came into the industry in the mid eighties.
Right. It was very exciting, very creative. Some very clever people that's now become a, a sway of digital agencies. The advertising agencies have sort of drifted out and um, and that's
Marcus Cauchi: Technicians.
Barnaby Wynter: And they're all technicians and they're all looking at spreadsheets and they're all looking at, at conversion rates.
And they're all looking at, and actually you're right, the humanity in, in the six steps that are contained within the six steps of the brand market are completely absent from the marketing industry because it's all been broken down into little tiny pieces. So you can go and get, you can go to a LinkedIn shop or you can go to a a a, an Instagram shop, or you can go PPC shop or an SEO shop, or you can go to a, a design agency or you can go to a web company. They're all ro we've broken up the, the industry into these tiny little profit [00:55:00] hungry, money at any cost things, uh, they,
Marcus Cauchi: They, they, there's totally focused on pointless, irrelevant data.
Barnaby Wynter: Correct.
Marcus Cauchi: That's what they're being measured on.
Barnaby Wynter: Correct. Cause there's no humanity in the data.
How can people get a hold of you?
Marcus Cauchi: And Barnaby we've gotta come, we, we've gotta bring this to a close, unfortunately. Tell me how can people get a hold of you?
Barnaby Wynter: You can find me on LinkedIn very easily, but I'm Barnaby Wynter with a Y, it's W Y N T R Barnaby Wynter. I have a, a website of the same name, ww dot barnaby Wynter.com.
Try me there and if you look up the brand bucket, you should find me. Uh, but it is the brand bucket. There is another company called Brand Bucket in America, does a similar thing, nothing to do with us, so just my website, LinkedIn profile. Best way or, or actually. Contact Marcus and say, great show, and he will point you towards me.
I think that's probably the, then, you know, I've got him working for me then. That's fantastic. .
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Uh, and I'll be happy to do that. I'd [00:56:00] love to have you back.
Barnaby Wynter: Yeah, I would really, I enjoy that too.
Marcus Cauchi: Barnaby Wynter. Thank you.
Barnaby Wynter: Thank you so much.
Marcus Cauchi: So this is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from the Inquisitor Podcast.
If you are the owner or CEO of a tech company and your goal is to grow your business and achieve genuine, sustainable hypergrowth with highly engaged and highly productive employees and clients who stick with you year after year after year, let's schedule a time for a brief convers. You can reach me at marcus@laughs-last.com or via LinkedIn and if you think you'd be a good guest or you know someone who would be, then please do get in touch, put then connect us. In the meantime, stay safe and happy selling.
Bye-bye.
