At Super Brand Publishing, we are experts at helping you become the world authority you always knew you could be. You know it. We know it. And this is how the rest of the world catches up.
Confidence, passion, and a strong vision of her potential have all contributed to Juliet Clark's incredible success as a woman entrepreneur.
Juliet Clark founded Winsome Media Group in November 2009. Within 90 days of opening her coaching and publishing company, she had filled her coaching schedule and established herself as an expert helping people build their digital footprint to sell more books, products, and services.
Juliet's ability to help other fast track their success has made her extraordinarily successful. She assists her clients in all facets of publishing, and book and business marketing.
Juliet is passionate about helping authors achieve their dreams. In addition to personal coaching, Juliet is also known as a motivational speaker and teacher through her Author Success Academy and the Entrepreneur Success Academy. She also is the host of a podcast called Ask Juliet, which answers author's questions and features successful authors and speakers who have effectively build platforms.
Specialities: Professional speaker, motivational speaker, business webinars, author business bootcamps
Interview Transcript
Hugh Ballou: Greetings to this edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. Each week, we review techniques, strategies, skills, and culture development. We review all those things that are missing in the organizations that we lead. We bring in people who are successful in business, and they share their business strategies, their business skills, their framework for what they do. They have a specific area of expertise. Russell and I co-host this each week, and we encourage leaders in charities, all kinds, to install sound business principles into the organizations that they lead. Russell, welcome.
Russell Dennis: Happy Tuesday. Welcome again, everybody. It’s good to be here. Thank you, Juliet, for joining this. It’s a beautiful sunny day in Denver, Colorado, and we are finally north of 30 degrees.
Hugh: I am in Virginia, the south central part of Virginia, and it is in the mid-60s. It is top down weather from the convertible. Our guest today, as you already let out of the bag, is Juliet Clark. Juliet, where are you coming in from?
Juliet Clark: I am coming in from Draper, Utah, where we actually broke 30 today as well. It’s sunny. The snow is thawing. But more snow tomorrow from what I hear.
Hugh: Your company is Super Brand Publishing. There is also this Winsome Media group. I will let you talk about your background. Basically, what is the background that has given you the expertise to talk about what you are going to talk about today? The title of what we are talking about is How Community Building and Assessment Marketing Helped You Build Relationships. At the bottom of leadership, at the bottom of communication, at the bottom of attracting funding would be relationship. Juliet, welcome, and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Juliet: Well, thank you for having me on, Russell and Hugh. I actually started out in the traditional publishing world and went on to advertising. I worked on the Nissan account, and then I moved on to Mattel to work on some of their products. Around 2008, I decided to write my first book, and I thought it would be a no-brainer getting it published. Self-publishing was brand new, and I went out and took my fiction novel, which—by the way I will tell you guys a little secret—I was going through a divorce. I wrote a mystery novel, and I killed my ex-husband. I was very anxious to get that published because it was either that or wear felony orange for the rest of my life. I am blonde, so not my color.
To move on from there, I published my first book. I found a lot of inadequacies in the self-publishing world, things that I thought were super unethical. I created my own publishing company, so that is where my expertise began. By my third book, I had built my own platform and sold over 25,000 copies of that one. I was out of family members to kill, so that sold a lot more than my previous novels.
I moved on from there. After that happened, my friends came and wanted me to help build their platforms. The company just morphed throughout the years. We were noticing entrepreneurs were writing books. When they brought them to us, we got a sense right away that this was not going to be the breakthrough product that their writing coaches had told them it would be. It was probably going to be another in a long line of failed products because they didn’t have a platform. That is where we are today.
We have Winsome Media Group, where we focus primarily on building platforms for companies, coaches, authors, speakers, small businesses. Super Brand Publishing, where if you are really serious about that book needs to be a bestseller, we go back and we build ROI on those failed products and services that you have in the past and position that book as the icing on the cake instead of the main event. We are a fix-it crew that goes back and fixes all that other stuff that wasn’t done correctly and starts bringing ROI into your business.
If I had to sum it up, I would say we are a marketing company disguised as a publishing company for the most part.
Hugh: That’s key. To wrap around the relevance for the charities, it’s that we don’t know how to build this engagement model that you are talking about that is so important, building relationships. Before I go further, would you describe what you mean by “platform?”
Juliet: A platform is where you build your audience, your fan base. In the fiction world, it was a little bit harder because you had characters you had to build that around. In the nonfiction world, it is building those people who are engaged in your business. I think there is a big gap out there between the digital world and the old networking ways that we used to work. There are people who are my age, probably 45 and older—not that I’m 45, but I will just pretend I’m down there— that they are really experts at being able to build relationships one on one. That is what we grew up with. But they don’t know how to bring in that digital space that they need. We teach them how to build relationships online because you can’t sell online unless you have relationships built. People don’t know you, like you, and trust you. Then we have this other group out there who are the younger generation, who are really invested in that digital platform, but they are not really great at building one on one relationships the way our generation is. We bring all of that together. We combine that personal and that digital to actually build relationships with people before you sell to them online.
Hugh: That is amazing. I have 250,0000 in various platforms, following on mostly Twitter. I am driving a large fast-growing platform on LinkedIn. But Facebook is my least favorite. That is your most favorite. All in all, social media is in fact social. I am amazed at how many people don’t treat it. Hey, I’m George, buy my stuff. It’s really disappointing to get those things all the time. I would say 95% of what I get is a very awkward approach. It’s like me inviting a girl out and saying, “Let’s kiss first.”
Juliet: Exactly.
Hugh: Wait a minute. Why should I kiss you? There is this building a trusted relationship before people even want to consider anything that you’ve got. Let’s talk about the two pillars that were in the title. One is building a community. Talk about the context of what that means and why that’s important. The other piece is the assessment piece. Can you talk about those? Describe them, and talk about why they’re important.
Juliet: Absolutely. Community building has recently become even more important than it was in the past. It used to be that you opened your business or your book page on Facebook. Because social media, and this is very important, social media is not yours, it belongs to the person who owns the platform. For Facebook, I may have several pages or communities, but they don’t belong to me. They belong to Mark Zuckerberg. At the end of the day, that’s his monetization platform. Now all of a sudden, business pages have become obsolete because he wants to monetize. That’s capitalism. So he has lowered visibility on those pages down to about 4-7% of the content that you produce people actually see. Inside of a community, which is a group on Facebook, people see 100% of what’s in there. 100% of what you post to 100% of the people who are in that community.
Where the assessment marketing comes in is that once you have a community, and this is the old thinking of it, is that you build this community, you draw people in with Facebook ads, you put people in to that group, and then you find out what they want afterwards. The way that we do it is completely different because we use the assessment marketing to make sure we have our ideal client, our target market in that group. That’s how we use the assessment. Finding out where their skill levels are at, what kind of content do they need that will be valuable to them and create value to them. What skill level are they at? We use microcommitments within those. Are we speaking to beginners? Are we speaking to seasoned experts who would like to bump up where they are at in the world? We use that assessment marketing to create the engagement within the group. What questions do we ask them? How do we keep this going? What kind of content do they need to begin building trust with me? That is where we like to use those two together to make sure that we have not just a big group of people in there because that is all about ego, but the right people in there that we actually can serve.
Hugh: Be careful of that ego thing. You have three males on the line here.
Juliet: I don’t get a flavor that you’re really egocentric men.
Hugh: Okay, thank you. Let’s frame this in a couple subsections. We are talking to charities who don’t commonly publish a book. Let’s rethink that. They really don’t tell their story, so there is another track that maybe they haven’t thought of and they can even get a sponsor to put their name on it and pay for the whole thing. There is that track. There is also the track of building the platform so that we have people in community, which is people together with a common philosophy, a common passion, things like that so that community is where people relate to and talk to each other. The most important thing I believe in online community isn’t content; it’s relationship. Would you agree or disagree?
Juliet: I think that’s the most important thing, but content plays a big part of that. In order to be able to show people your expertise, you need to be able to communicate value to them. That is where the content really comes in. I like to liken it to when you have a book. There is that concept that most writers don’t get, which is show, not tell. A community does the same thing through content. You are showing people that you are really an expert at what you do. You re showing them value instead of them saying, “Me over here, I’m a great guru. Buy from me.” You are laying out the trust factor there. People are getting to know you. You are giving them actionable tips so that they see that you really know what you’re doing and you are creating that value for them. When they are ready, the assessment marketing can drive them easily into a strategy session or more nurturing. It’s a nurturing sequence.
I like to liken it to dating, sort of like you did. If I go out on a date with you and you say on the first date, “Juliet, would you marry me?” It is icky. Not that I feel icky with you, but you get it. I’m like looking around to see where the bathroom is and where that is positioned to the back door so I can call a cab and sneak out of there because it was too much, too soon, and it feels really icky. That is what all of this is about. I’m showing you that I have value and nurturing you.
Hugh: Let’s bring this back. These are really sound business principles for marketing. This is an area that charities are blind to: marketing and creating relationships and people who buy are donors. People who buy are sponsors. People who buy are grant makers. People who buy are board members who donate but they give their time. People who buy are volunteers. We take it for granted that people just want to show up because we have a passion. Being able to communicate a message, build a relationship, and show people why it’s important, I think it’s a missing skillset. What do you think about that repositioning of what you said?
Juliet: I think it absolutely is as well. A lot of people don’t do it because it’s time-consuming. It takes a lot to communicate, to sit down and write something up, or do a video. I think it’s definitely something that’s missing. The more that you can communicate with that crowd, the donor crowd, when you can show them a video, when you can speak to what the needs are, the better you are able to bring those people in because just you and me having a conversation, you may be passionate about it, but I will forget about that passion ten minutes later.
Hugh: The passion needs to be internalized with whomever you are talking to.
Juliet: It needs to be presented in a way they will remember. For some people, that is visual. For some people, that is reading about it, but yes, something they can go back and digest later as well.
You mentioned a book. I actually did a really great book Blue Laguna for a nonprofit called Blue Laguna. They sell that book, and it’s something that you take home and put on your coffee table. People joined. We sold the book out because people were so enthralled by yes, I need to have that passion for cleaning up the ocean. Look at these beautiful animals. Things like that where people have a real takeaway and get a real sense of how far you are willing to go with your passion.
Hugh: I just know so many charities that have such good stories and they never tell them, except in little circles. This idea of why don’t we do a book, and I’m sure you have ways to help people take the ideas and put them on paper.
I am going to call on my colleague in the pink shirt. He says he has the perfect head; I think I have hair. We have to debate that. I think it takes a real man to wear pink, don’t you, Juliet?
Juliet: I love it when men wear pink.
Hugh: We are of course recording this for the podcast so people can’t see us. They can only imagine what Russell looks like wearing pink. Russell, you in a number of these sessions have made a really good point about when we are approaching board members or donors or sponsors to find out what they are interested in. What kind of thread do you see in that coming from what Juliet is talking about and building the community, building a platform, and engaging people in a meaningful conversation?
Russell: It’s just like any verbal language. Everybody has their language. You pointed out those five personas that are actually customers of ours. In the material I have put together for people, I have a customer profile that has turned up in both of my courses. You have to have a separate one for each group that you are talking to. We have technology that we are beholden to. You need the technology, but the old relationship building process and skills are still relevant and important. You have to take time to nurture these relationships on one hand, and on the other hand, you have to be where all the people you want to reach are. That puts you in the space where you have to do a little bit of everything. And that is what building the community is about.
I talked with Rick Feeney, another publisher, at one point about having a nonprofit write a book because it is something for them to tell their story with. But Juliet has actually worked with some nonprofits. When you approach a nonprofit or you talk with an organization, what is the biggest hurdle that you have seen charities have to overcome to embrace this idea of building a community?
Juliet: That’s a great question. A lot of times, it’s the organization within the nonprofit. There is a lot of who is going to run this? We are spread so thin. Do we really have time to do the assessment? Do we have the avenue? Do I feel comfortable? Who is going to go out there and ask somebody to do platformbuilding.com or whatever yours is and see how this serves you, see where you’re at with this? There is a lot of resistance behind who is going to do it, mostly. When it comes to the book, it’s we don’t have money. We don’t have money to invest in something like this. Or even marketing. They don’t have money to invest in marketing. It’s usually one or two people who are really passionate about it, and they are out there trying to spend all their time raising money, and the administrative isn’t there to facilitate this. Would you guys agree?
Hugh: It’s part of what we encourage people to move away- Even though we call this The Nonprofit Exchange, it’s a channel that people understand, but we try to encourage people inside the organizations. Russell used the word “charity.” It’s a tax-exempt charity, a social capital organization. We mistakenly go into this nonprofit as a philosophy and not a tax classification. There is a resetting of your thinking. A lot of organizations think they can’t afford it when in fact they should afford it because it will make a huge difference in their outcomes.
Also, I do think there is a channel here if they came up with a really good proposal for what they are doing, why it’s important, what the impact is going to be. I think they can find somebody to fund it for them. They think about we can only fund it out of our budget instead of tapping into the people who are passionate about the mission and asking one of them to fund it or a combination of them funding it or do a crowdfunding campaign around the initiative.
Guys, David has joined us. David Dunworth. Are you in Florida today, sir?
David Dunworth: Yeah, I’m in Florida. I had to go to Chicago for a couple of days.
Hugh: You came back to thaw out. You and Russell, you are following this really neat thread. Coming from ostensive marketing background and knowing charities, what question do you have for Juliet?
David: I literally don’t have any questions, but the comment on the book authorship is something that I have been talking with a couple of nonprofit people that I am presently working with that I think is one of the best vehicles to tell their story and unify their message, which not only works internally, but also externally. Like you said, Juliet, the coffee table book or whatever you want to call it, it’s the world’s greatest business card. I think that is an idea that really needs to propel itself forward. A great way to do things.
Juliet: I didn’t mention there, one of the things we did inside the book as well was we had QR codes in there. You could actually take your phone and click on it and go to video, which I think was super powerful as well. The author of the book had Go Pro video out in the middle of a plot of orcas he was paddle boarding in. Blue whales and things like that. They were astounding. That was a huge part of bringing people in. His group has over, I think last time I checked, a million people at his business page over on Facebook because people grasp into what he was talking about with the ocean ecology.
Hugh: It’s fascinating to try to go backwards to figure out what makes something go viral like that and catch on in a big way.
Juliet, you spoke about you don’t really own the community in Facebook. Why would you do Facebook rather than setting up your own independent community?
Juliet: Here is what we do with it. We really encourage that through the assessment marketing, before someone can get the results, they have to give you an email address so they can get them. One of the things that we do very well from past experience is we transition as soon as we can people from Facebook into our email list. Ultimately, our email list is that tool that no one can take away from us. I would imagine for charities, it’s a huge way to build relationships with the donors as well. Look what we’re doing. See how we’re doing it. That’s one of the first things that we work on with the assessment: being able to have people get it, take it before they come into the group, and it’s a criterion to get into the Facebook community. We are immediately transitioning people so that we can contact them in the event something does happen and Facebook goes away. All of that came from a really bad experience one of my friends had over on MySpace where she had an online newsletter that got over 300,000 hits a month, and she was making money from sponsorships. When MySpace went away, she didn’t have a list. She lost all those people. That is part of what we do with the Facebook community. Have that group of people there, but we also work very hard to get them into our list as well.
Hugh: When you are reaching out and creating relationship with people, why Facebook instead of LinkedIn or Twitter?
Juliet: I never thought Twitter was a great relationship building tool. I stay away from it. For me, it’s content curation instead of putting your own out there. It’s so wild. It’s a little like being on reality TV some days. I stay away from Twitter.
LinkedIn is primarily used- If you look at the statistics, people jump on, they stay on for a few minutes, they look at what they need to look at, and they get off. Facebook is some place where people go to relax. They are clicking around, they stay on it a lot longer, it’s easier to build relationships and friendships over there than it is on those other platforms.
Hugh: I find that people- Sorry?
Juliet: More social.
Hugh: It is. Social media. I find that people on Facebook are my B2B contacts and they are serious about the conversations and are not looking at other things. They are looking for something meaningful. The most important relationships I have are people I met on Twitter, the highest-level thought leaders, the editor of our magazine for example. I met him on Twitter. He has a Ph. D in organizational leadership. We have been working together for years. We met on Twitter. He said, “I will come visit you.” We ultimately met in person. I have gotten a lot of traction on Twitter. You’re right. It can be like reality TV. Right now, it’s exploding.
There is this weird thing going on in Facebook and Twitter especially that they are censoring things and deleting accounts. One day, I will wake up with 100 Twitter followers gone. It jumps around radically. I can just only figure that there weren’t 100 people who got up and hated me one day. 100 people lost their accounts. I can see censors. I don’t know anybody who has lost a Facebook account, but I have read things about Facebook doing similar things. To your point of making sure that you have something you own where you have those relationships like an email list.
Russell, you’re moving around like you have a really good- Russell asks the hard questions. What’s brewing in that mind?
Russell: I was just thinking maybe if I could put some tweets out there to convince people that I am stable in my following.
Juliet: Are you unstable?
Russell: All those communities have a different audience and a different purpose. I just jumped out there initially because I thought, Well, I need to try to be everywhere and understand what these different platforms offer. I try to post stuff in all of them. As far as engagement goes, I probably have a little bit more interactivity on LinkedIn just for myself. What Juliet is talking about is really important to understand where your tribe is because the people that you’re trying to attract, if you have a diverse group age-wise, they will be all over the place. You may need to spend more time using one platform more than the other, but the key is in your donor database. Those names and the information that you collect. How strong a case do you have to make to get people to actually endeavor to build the list because the money is in the list? If they can build a donor database. How many people do you run across that don’t actually have a list? Is it difficult to make a case for them to do that?
Juliet: That’s a great question. We actually put polls inside of our community because we have a platform-building community. I do want to mention in order to get into our community, you have to fill out an assessment and some questions because we don’t take everyone. You have to be our ideal client. That is such a huge point because if you have a huge mishmash of people who aren’t interested, you destroy the energy of your group.
Getting people to build a list is very difficult. They don’t, especially for book people because making a bestseller list has become so difficult. You can’t just have a bunch of sales on Amazon now. You need them over several platforms, which means you need to be talking to those people in your list before presale and finding out where they read. It’s really hard to communicate that to people, that that list is where all their money is at. If I send something out to my list, I know what percentage will open, and I pretty much can guess what percentage will purchase from there. If you just have a group of 1,300 people on Facebook and you have a small list, chances are they are not going to buy there. But if you have a large list, you can start looking at those analytics and find out how much you can actually bring in. It’s super important. We do a list purge every year. We are about to get ready to do it now. We say, “Hey, if you’re not interested anymore, please unsubscribe yourself. If we don’t hear from you, we will unsubscribe you in 30 days.” We like to keep it super clean and make sure it’s our ideal client. But it’s difficult to communicate that to people.
Russell: One of the things that happens to people, I have an email inbox. I have several accounts. It’s almost out of control. You go and get information, and there are some people that email you to buy things you already purchased. That might be the experience of somebody. Are you running into people that say, “I don’t want to be that person that relentlessly emails three times a day all day every day?” Is that a barrier to getting people to accept the idea of building a list?
Juliet: It is in some sense. We let people know when they opt in that we send out a piece of content a week. Unless we are running a campaign, we usually don’t overemail our list. Once a week is enough to say, “Hi, I’m here, I’m providing value” without being obnoxious. With what we teach, we don’t constantly hammer for sales. We are building trust and bringing in people through the assessments and talking to them one on one, which is the best way to build a relationship.
Hugh: That’s amazing.
Russell: We should talk a little bit about the assessment process. I think I’ve seen some platforms that talk about creating assessments, but what are some of the things that you typically want to put in there? How do you actually talk to people about how to tailor those, how to use them? How do you use them yourself? I know that you talked about making sure you only had the right people in the community. What is the process for crafting the types of questions that are going to make sure you have the right people?
Juliet: For us, first of all, we use the Smart Biz Quiz. I think it’s the best tool out there. It does collect the email, and it gives you a lot of information. It also has a commitment section, which puts together an auto-responder. It has its own auto-responder with it.
The process we usually go through is what are the things you need to know most about your consumer? For you, you have five different consumers. You would have to go off in different directions with five different assessments.
For platform building, first we want to find out if they know who their audience is. We go through that with them. On a scale of 1-10, we ask a couple questions. What we find out a lot of times is they don’t even know who their ideal client is. That may be something you guys need as well.
Then we jump into what are your social media skills? Several questions. We usually try to keep it to three to four minutes’ worth of questions because we don’t want people to go away because they are bogged down.
From social media, we go into list building.
Then our last section is usually about building a funnel because we want to know if you have a funnel built or if you are starting from scratch. It’s basically what do you need to know about your consumer, and what is it your consumer needs to know about themselves? When you are looking at that- I love Jane Deuber who created this system. She positions it best because she talks about taking the view off of you and putting it on them. Let’s take the spotlight off me and put it on you and see where you are really at with all this.
The last part of it is the commitment section. There you put your three biggest objections. On a scale of 1-10, you ask people for me it’s time, money, and do I want to fix the problem? We ask those questions, and then based on those answers, the auto-responder will put out an appropriate offer. On a 1-30 scale in the commitment level, if you come in between 20 and 30, we want to talk to you. We offer you a free strategy session. If you come in between 10 and 20, we have a medium range; we offer you an application. If you fill out that application, we want to talk to you. If you can’t be bothered, you go back in the nurture pile. With a 0-10, we give you something free. You’re probably not willing to fix the problem or invest in yourself, time or money-wise. That is what we look at because we want to be talking to people who are ready to purchase today. We are delegating our time, and we are keeping tabs on where people are at in the process.
Hugh: Russell, how do you see that applying to getting donors, getting board members, getting volunteers?
Russell: That is a great system. I have never heard anything. As you can see, I was writing furiously. That is brilliant. That is why I asked how you actually go about it. That makes perfect sense because right now, it is a numbers game. You are better off spending time around the people who are more engaged than trying to convince people and make a case. There is already a tribe out there. Get to the tribe. Get to the people who are ready. They come glass in hand and say, “I want my portion of the Kool-Aid.” That is where they are plugged in. Other people you can bring along. Because of the constraints on resources, nonprofit leaders just don’t have that kind of time to chase people who may or may not have an affinity. I think that is really great. I am going to check out this Smart Biz Quiz tool. I looked at another one, and to be honest, I haven’t gone back because they take something that is simple and make it a process. The important thing is to ask the best questions. It’s not the people who have all the answers; the questions need to change. Asking the best questions that positions you to be more helpful.
Hugh: Juliet, are you familiar with a book by Ryan Levesque called Ask?
Juliet: Yes, I am. A lot of this is right out of this. What’s interesting is before his book came out, I was already working with Jane Deuber’s tool because she created it before that book came out, I believe. What she does is brilliant with it. You’re always going to have those looky-loos, but you don’t want to spend time with them. I think this process really helps with that.
Hugh: Looky-loos. She is not talking about- Russell is still writing. She is not talking about good-looking dudes like us.
I am coming up with a paradigm shift here. We chase people. We beg them to come on board. We tell them there is not much work, and they know we’re lying. Turning the tables on this, we are looking for a few skilled volunteers. We are looking for a few committed board members. Russell, we deal with this low-performing culture. Charity leaders are reluctant to ask people to do things when the data shows that the more you ask of people, the more they are going to do. They find a reason to do it, and it’s connecting to their passion. Russell, am I making sense? Is there a paradigm shift here? As we are saying we are building a board here, here is an assessment, we want to check to make sure it’s a good fit. What are you thinking about that?
Russell: When people write you a check, or even more importantly they have agreed to roll up their sleeves and spend some time with you, you have them. They are committed to what you’re doing. Asking a little bit more of them honors their commitment. If they have time constraints, they will be hesitant. It makes sense to ask these people who are already supporting you to help ramp up those efforts. Who do you know? Who else do you know that could come in and contribute time, talent, or treasure?
Hugh: That’s right. We have people show up. We haven’t really segmented them. These are the tactical people. Here is the visionary people. Here are the introverts. Here are the extroverts. Here are the people who like to do phone follow-up work. Here are the people who hate to make phone calls.
Sitting down in Clearwater, Florida, David, anything coming to your mind about how this assessment can help pre-qualify volunteers, board members, advisors, people like that?
David: That is one of the primary methods. Through Juliet’s assignment process, you are funneling into the basins for where your clients want to be. The people who are responding into that survey, you are being able to automatically segment them through that sophistication.
I listened to a podcast a couple weeks ago, and it was a marketing expert who was talking about how he restaffed his disc jockey wedding music business to the point where he utilized automation to hire people. He did precisely what Juliet has just described. He took them through a series of assessments and exercises first of all to see if they can follow directions. It’d be surprising how many people will read the email and respond when the email says, “Just send me the highlights of your career,” and somebody sends you the full resume. Things like that.
I see the value in that assessment filter system to utilize a process for the nonprofit from board members to volunteers. Those board members who are- Every organization has them. I sat on several boards, and a lot of people would talk to me about how to get on a board. I want to get on a board. Those are the people that you really want to stay away from because they are looking more or less for something to hang on the far end of their name as opposed to somebody who wants to share their passion and their gifts and their time with the mission that the organization is based on. I think that filter system sounds great.
Hugh: Juliet, we have used the word “funnel” a few times. There may be people who are listening who don’t understand that. It sounds like we pour them into a drain. How are you meaning put them into a funnel?
Juliet: Depends on which bucket they went into. Some we might pour down the drain. When I talk about a funnel, I mean actually having a marketing campaign set up. I use the funneling assessment and the community as the head of my funnel. People who come into there, then we get them into our list. We also have campaigns that are behind that. It’s bringing them from social media into our world into social media into our list and then being able to sell them. You are taking this big crowd. It doesn’t look like this on the inside. It looks more like a spider web when you do it right.
Let’s say you speak in front of a room and you invite people to come over and take your assessment. There will be a certain number of people who will actually do that. The rest will go away. From that assessment, you will invite people into your community. There are going to be people who took that assessment who may not want to be a part of your community. Then you get people inside who transition to the list. Not all of those people are going to go. You are narrowing down from a bigger group who a little interest, more interest, a lot of interest, we’re in. That is what you are really doing with all that, giving them baby steps and opportunities to come in. If they take them, great. If they don’t, let’s get it down to people who want the opportunity.
Hugh: Ryan Levesque says in his book that people don’t like to do surveys, but they like to give their opinion. What have you found?
Juliet: The way our system is set up, you’re not really giving an opinion. I bet if you did this for something like politics, everybody has an opinion. I think he’s right in that sense. But here’s the thing that entices them to take the assessment. When you position it in a way to find out where your skill level is really at, people are curious about that. I wonder if I am as good as I think I am. I wonder if I am as bad as I think I am. That is where the curiosity is getting in and finding out more about let’s look at you instead of let’s look at me. When you are down the line and selling something, it makes it much easier to sell whatever you’re selling when their defenses are down. If I have to go into a strategy session and say, “Your social media isn’t up to par,” your social media may not be up to par, but your immediate reaction is, “No, it’s not.” That wall goes up, and it makes it more difficult for me to close. When you are able to come into a webinar or a strategy session or a selling situation and you already know that you need the help, you’re much more open to the suggestion. You are much more open to me telling you that this is where you’re at and this is where your vision is and now let’s fill that gap. In a lot of ways, it has to be that curiosity about where they are as an individual on the topic.
Hugh: There is a lot of nuances to this. I’ve ignored the primary piece that you were talking about, which is thinking how we engage people as volunteers, board members, servant leaders in the organization. There is one of the eight streams of revenue that we teach people how to create is earned income. It is selling things that are related to what you’re doing: books, events, doing trainings. There are business streams of earned income that are relevant to what the charity is doing. Utilizing a lot of these and then the idea of telling your story in a book, maybe even having an anthology where you have your tribe write a chapter or tell the story so that you have an anthology, which ups the investment of people investing in the books so they want to share it. Thinking about creating revenue streams by there is lots of books we can sell or programs we can sell. We could even sign on for affiliate programs. We teach charities to think about signing up at Walmart and getting a number so when people buy, they give your number, and Walmart takes a percentage and donates it to your charities. Grocery stores have the cards they use to donate to charities.
We talked about how we interview people for meaningful volunteer work. Going back to creating the funnel, where can people go to learn about what you do and how you teach? Do you have webinars or self-studies? Or is it only working with Juliet?
Juliet: We have seen a shift in the marketplace lately where people aren’t dying to work on self-studies anymore. Most of our programs are either one on one or group programs. The group program, I work one on one with you and build your first assessment, your community, and the editorial within it. Go to winsomemediagroup.com. There are a couple programs over there. The one where we build the community and the assessment is JulietClark.com/rdsm. You can find out more about that program. And we have a group over on Facebook, a platform building group. It’s Facebook.com/groups/platformbuilders.
Hugh: Michael Hyatt has a book called Platform.
Juliet: He does.
Hugh: Any similarities in what he teaches and what you’re teaching?
Juliet: I think if I had done the book back when he did, yes, there would be. But I think there has been so much change that has occurred since he wrote the first book. I’d love to see him come out with an updated version. I think there has been a shift in the marketplace that that book is very basic now. Our consumer has gotten much more savvy. I would love to see him write a more updated book in that sense. He’s got the basics.
Hugh: Using that, he created quite a substantial tribe and a large footprint.
We are on the final stretch of our interview. I‘m going to give Russell and David a chance to ask another question, and then I will do a wrap with Juliet. David? Russell? Who wants to go first?
David: Russell is first.
Russell: There is lots there. For those who were wondering what we’re talking about, I have not read the book yet, but I came across this, and I have forgotten that I downloaded it. It has remarkable charts on there. But I am going to go back and take it a step further because this is a wonderful valuable product that he just added and didn’t charge any money for. There is lots of information out there. But people don’t need more information. They need somebody to help them make more sense of it. Juliet, I am going to go to your community and sign in and learn a little bit more about how you employ these tools. It’s one thing to read it and another thing to see somebody actually take it and apply it. Remarkable stuff. I love this. You can never learn too much. It’s important.
The last question I have on getting nonprofits or anybody on that matter, because you probably deal with small businesses and other people, too: What are the three most common objections you have to somebody embarking on the process?
Juliet: Oh, that’s so easy. Time. I don’t have time to fix the problem. Platform building does take time. I don’t care what you see out there. Six figures in six months. 100,000 in 90 days. It’s a process. You don’t build a relationship in five minutes, and you don’t build a platform in five minutes. It is truly an integral process that takes I would say at least a good six months to a year when you build it organically.
The second is money. There are a lot of books out there that tell people how to do it, but the biggest problem I see is that people are reading books. By the time they read the books, the information is outdated, and they are now bringing outdated platform pieces together and integrate them.
The third is, I don’t need to do it; I will be discovered. A lot of people think that it’s as easy as I am going to put my stuff out there and some influencer will discover me and I will be on my way. That is about as likely as the next supermodel being found at age 12 in a store in Milwaukee.
Hugh: That’s so real. As you know, entrepreneurs and most charities think because they have something worthy, people will beat a pathway to their door, and money will follow in their pockets, which is so far from true. There are ditches filled with people who didn’t make it. They fell off the road.
David, in Clearwater.
David: I don’t have any questions. I am sitting here aghast and amazed at the process. Like Russell, I am heading over to your spot to see just how bad I am.
Juliet: How good you are. Position it nicely. Position it positively.
David: I am trying to pick up on something you said earlier in the day. Yeah, you’re right. I am looking forward to finding out more about the process. Thank you.
Juliet: Cool, thank you.
Hugh: Juliet, what would you like to leave people with?
Juliet: Start building your community the minute you have the idea. Whether it’s a book, a product, a service, validate it there before you spend a whole lot of money finding out that it’s not valid, that it doesn’t have a market, that it doesn’t have the purpose you think. Take all of that feedback that that community gives you, and figure out a way to make it all work if it’s a viable product. Don’t do it the other way around.
Hugh: Juliet Clark, thank you very much. This has been priceless information today.
Juliet: Thank you for having me.
Hugh: Absolutely.
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How Community Building and Assessment Marketing Help You Build Relationships (Archive) | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
