Getting to $100 Million in Sales with Demand Generation

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today, we are talking about the difference between marketing, branding and demand generation.

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What are the differences, why is it important and what should you prioritize?

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And we have a great guest to help us talk through that.

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It is Don Markland, and he is a seasoned entrepreneur, executive coach, marketer and sales guru.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey Eric, Thank you so much for having me on.

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I'm super excited to be here.

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So why don't we start out by you sharing just a minute or two with people about who you are, what you do, what you've done?

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I'd love to Eric.

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I'm the CEO and founder of Accountability Now.

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I'd love to Eric I'm the CEO and founder of Accountability Now.

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We are a business coaching firm.

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I actually don't even take private clients anymore.

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We have five coaches on our team and we work with clients all over the world.

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Our kind of claim to fame is we work with people from back of the napkin to 10 million and my career was.

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I was originally started in call centers thinking I was going to be some middle management call center executive my whole life until I found a kind of a different purpose.

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My wife went through cancer and we went through that and we had a whole other perspective of what we wanted to do with our life.

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And after jumping into entrepreneurship and experiencing that and being able to participate in an exit and seeing what that was like, we built this business accountability now and it's been wonderful.

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And now we really focused our whole business on helping businesses grow on scale off of the principles that we know apply to our whole business, on helping businesses grow on scale off of the principles that we know apply to our own business.

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And we've done it our own entrepreneur's journey and it's really exciting, it's really fun.

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I love that the first 10 million is always the hardest 10 million right.

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The first, from zero to one, is your hardest.

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And then you go like the milestones are from zero to one are hard, and from one to three is your next milestone and we've got these three awards.

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There's a company called ClickFunnels.

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They're an amazing software provider for sales funnels.

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We've won three different what's called a two comma club award, which means we've generated a million dollars through one specific offer, through their funnel, and it's all driven through marketing.

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So we, because we understand how the traffic works and the conversion process works, we've been able to win a million dollars through these funnels three different ways and it's been awesome and love it.

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So tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done.

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I think in building some of these funnels you've even won a three comma award.

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Let's hear a story about some of the best marketing you've done there so the biggest thing and it's what you let in to this whole conversation is the difference between brand marketing, marketing and lead generation.

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And I know your listeners run into this.

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I know because so many people get frustrated because they go hire an agency or they go spend money on their own Google ads and they're like this doesn't work and they get really frustrated by all this wasted money.

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And it's because they're spending money on branding or marketing, expecting lead generation results.

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And there are very, three, very different things.

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Branding is when you're spending money to position yourself as an authority, like PR or podcasting or things like that are brand focused.

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Marketing is when I'm trying to position myself in the right position in front of congregation points, my market, so that they can see me and so that when they are ready to buy then they can take that.

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But again, that's not necessarily lead generation.

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Lead generation is intentionally trying to take advantage of high intent like Google ads, really high intent things.

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That's not meta ads, very different.

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And so we realized that different branding, marketing and lead generation.

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And I tell every single one of my clients, as well as any of your listeners start, I would tell them, start with lead generation, don't worry about branding.

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Don't worry about marketing.

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We're about lead generation.

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First, let's get cashflow in your business now and start that process, and then we will expand the other ones over time and watch what happens when you do that.

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I think that makes a lot of sense.

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I've always come from the demand generation side myself and have shared advice with people along similar lines of hey, when you're starting out, the temptation is to put like you're.

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Lot of people disagree with putting like zero in branding.

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I'm like okay, not zero, but keep it to 10% to, like you said, get the cash coming in the demand generation side.

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That's right, and the reason why is because we get so obsessed with vanity metrics.

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It's so obsessed with how we look or the likes or the follows or all these things, and at the end of the day, none of it matters.

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When in my financial services firm, which we grew to 89 million before we sold to private equity, we realized that almost 70% of our traffic we were able to get from unbranded affiliate partners that didn't know who we were at all.

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It was all lead generation traffic.

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And I had people telling me all the time Don, you're crazy, these people don't know who you are, there's no branding, there's no marketing.

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And I said you're right, it's all lead gen, we're 89 million and you're not.

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Who's the idiot right?

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So, like, focus on what drives cashflow and then you can expand the other area, not the other way.

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I think some people said, like you have to have a 10% or so of your effort on branding because you have to have, like, at least a reasonable logo or at least a reasonable homepage.

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I'm like, okay, that's fine, take a small percentage of your time to do that, but share a little bit about how you've done it yourself and or how you've done it for some of your clients.

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How do you get going in the lead generation side and have success there?

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We always start, so we one of the first things we always start with is we do a little exercise of trying to find out not so much about your ideal customer.

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Try to find out what type of pain your customer is moving away from.

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It's a great exercise because when we start with the cliche exercise of who's your ideal customer, that's a trap and all of your customers, all of your listeners, are doing this right now.

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You run into the trap of who's my ideal customer and they all start to go I want somebody that's got money, that shows up and is ready to buy.

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Right, okay, that is not an ideal customer, of course.

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Everybody just wants somebody that shows up, ready to buy, and that's the trap young entrepreneurs or early entry entrepreneurs run into.

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They are trying to just think of people with money.

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The goal is not thinking about people only with money, ready to buy.

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The goal is think about what pain they are trying to move away from.

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You can find a person with enough frustration and emotional pain you can solve.

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They will bring the money.

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They will find the money.

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Start there.

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Then, step two go and get the vanity url.

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Why branding isn't as important?

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They'll go get a url that is called after their name, they'll get their url after their business name is meaningless.

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They don't know who you are.

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I would rather you have a vanity URL, like, for example, in our firm, like my company is called accountability.

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Now, right, we're a business coaching firm.

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We do individual coaching and life coaching and all these things One of our best places to find your coach or not to self-promote here.

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But I'll just speak to a real exercise.

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One of the biggest problems people have is finding a coach is a miserable exercise.

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That's the pain they want to move from right.

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It's so frustrating.

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So we own the vanity URL myidealcom and if you go to myidealcoachcom, we have AI set up.

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We'll find your ideal coach for you in four minutes.

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Just take this quick assessment and we have AI that'll find your ideal coach for you in a minute.

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There you go.

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It's real simple.

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Now that's lead generation.

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You go to.

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You find the pain you want to move them from.

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Get them to your sales funnel and it'll solve it.

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And we don't have that branded in any way.

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They don't know what's accountability Now.

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They don't know Don Marklin, they don't know anything.

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All they know is this is the pain moving them away yeah, I actually agree the icp versus the pain, because the pain point that you're solving that is what determines if people have a willingness to pay or a desire.

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Amen exactly right, that's exactly they will find the money.

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I the one of the metaphors we use when we're talking about playing the movie of 127 hours 147 hours Pain is bad enough to cut off your arm.

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No one would really ever cut off their arm in general.

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You would if your life depended on it.

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So if you have bad enough pain, they will find the money.

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If you have bad enough pain, they will find the money, and so you've been able to run some million dollar, multimillion dollar demand gen campaigns.

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Talk about some of the ones that you're most proud of.

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I'm curious, and that's where the beauty of automation comes in, and we are really big on creating an automation process because when you're starting out as an entrepreneur, you don't have any money, don't have any budget, can't hire a team, you can't hire hundreds of people texting, instagram messaging and voicemail drops.

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Everything occurs seamlessly and doesn't feel like marketing, feels like engagement, so that when somebody goes to myidealcookcom, they feel like they're engaging with somebody for a very long time before they're even introduced to their team.

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And that's because in today's day and age, speed is everything.

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If your listeners could listen to anything and take away anything, they should write down.

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Don Mark was the smartest person I've ever known.

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They'll write down that.

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They should also write down that speed is everything.

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We live in an ADHD world.

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We live in a TikTok world.

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They've got Eric.

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You are brilliant.

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Like you said earlier, don, I like a 15 minute podcast.

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Nobody has attention, spot on.

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So somebody fills out your leave form or says they have interest.

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You better be on top of them within 30 seconds.

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The text and an email and a Facebook message, instagram message, snapchat, and we set up automation through all of it so that they can feel omnipresence around them and we are absolutely engaged and it's all done through a machine.

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I feel like they're a part of the family.

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Yeah, so I've studied over the years Russell Brunson and what he's done with ClickFunnels.

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He built like a $200 million company and a lot of people said, oh, that's just like spammy stuff for info marketers and I was like I don't think so I think he's found something that is very important.

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It's exactly what you just said.

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Was he really just helps people build a good process to walk people through marketing?

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And then the sale that is highly efficient, that's fast, that automates it, all of those things you just said right.

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Yeah, let me I.

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Then the sale that is highly efficient, that's fast, that automates it, all of those things you just said right.

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Yeah, let me I'll speak to that.

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So Russell Brunson he has a particular style that is very internet marketing, heavy sales copy.

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That is his particular style, right, but the method, the modality that he can be adjusted and reapplied.

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So we've used it in mental health care.

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So we've used it in psychiatry for companies there.

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We've used it in chiropractic, we use it in dental health, we've used it in coaching.

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We've used it in home services, we've used it in hvac services, where it was the exact same automation process but without the heavy sales copy.

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It was just the modality was the same but the tone and style was a little bit different and the conversions were still the same.

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And so sometimes people watch what Russell Brunson does because of his style and they get turned off and what they're missing is the modality, is what he's promoting, and that's where the wisdom is so valuable is.

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We use there's a few people that we follow.

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This is probably good advice for your listeners.

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We use a lot of.

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We absolutely love Russell Brunson's work.

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We love it.

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We love Myron Golden.

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We follow Myron Golden's work.

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We love his.

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There's a salesperson named Jeremy Miner.

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We listen and train on his stuff a lot.

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Jeremy trains sales resistance a lot.

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We also follow Don Margland a lot.

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We love my stuff.

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We follow my stuff a lot.

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We love my stuff.

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Can we do?

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We follow my stuff and we just are constantly training and rebranding.

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So I think you've given people some really practical tips on how to get to running million dollar demand generation campaigns, which is really great.

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Before I let you off the hook, I wanted to ask you a question, because you are the number one business coaching firm in the world.

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Does that?

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Does everyone need a business coach?

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great question and I'll just be a little self-serving, but, um, first of all, there is a scientific law called the law of entropy, which says anything left unto itself is in a constant state.

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That's science, like this chair I'm sitting in is constantly getting older.

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Right, we are constantly aging.

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Everything is always getting older.

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Yes, in that standpoint, everybody should be working with some sort of a coach.

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I have my own coach, even though I think I'm the smartest guy in the world, and I have my own coach, and so I would tell every business owner if you're not working with a coach the smartest guy in the world, and I have my own company, and so I would tell every business owner if you're not working with a coach, you're not moving as fast as you can, and it isn't as expensive as you think that it is.

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Every great business that you admire, I guarantee you has a guarantee you should be, and it will change your business and change the way that you work Awesome.

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Final thoughts from Don Marklin today.

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Anything I didn't ask you, you wanted to share.

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The number one mistake that your listeners make is that they think they have to do everything on their own.

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Don't Get help.

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Think bigger and go after it.

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I love that you're doing this, Eric.

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I wish on my very first business, podcasting wasn't a thing in the early 2000s.

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Make a mistake.

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I love that you have this vehicle.

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It's really awesome and I love what you're doing.

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Thank you very much for being with us today.

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Appreciate it, and I'm going to link to your website so people can get more of these great insights and connect with you and your team if they'd like to do.

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Thanks again for being on the show.

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Thank you so much, eric.

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Great work.