How a Startup Got to $1 Billion in Sales by Doing Unheard-of and Audacious Things

Intro: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, when you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the. Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Eric Eden: 0:57

All right, all right, all right. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to the podcast. Our guest today is going to tell us a story about taking a startup to over a billion dollars in sales in unheard of and audacious ways. Can't wait to get into this story. Roy has been a chief marketing officer and entrepreneur for the last 40 years. He has a great book called Be Different or Be Dead that we'll talk a little bit about at the end, but he is a mentor to startups and to entrepreneurs, helping them with marketing success. Welcome to the show, Roy.

Roy Osing: 1:35

Thank you very much, Eric, for having me. I'm honored.

Eric Eden: 1:39

All right, so let's get into this amazing story from startup to a billion dollars in sales. That's the dream, right? That's what everyone wants to do. So tell us a story about how you live that dream.

Roy Osing: 1:51

Yeah well, I would call it a journey of strategic meandering, because when I was asked to actually lead this organization in the early days of the Internet, we really didn't know. By the way, we were sitting in a monopoly telco at the moment. We had some really interesting cultural challenges to deal with but we, quite frankly, didn't really know what the opportunity was. We knew it was huge, but we didn't know what it was. So my approach as a leader was to keep it really simple in terms of the things that we did, in the hopes that they would light fires in people and convince them to not only go on our journey but to put their hearts and souls into executing the strategy that we came up with. I didn't start out with a long academic treatise on a strategic plan. I had to create my own by the way, I call it my strategic game plan which is really focused on not the efficacy of the plan but getting the implementation going and learning on the run. So we did a lot of audacious things, like creating a strategic game plan which is really all about answering three questions, which we can go into if you want. Secondly, and it's even worse, the notion of differentiation today is woefully inadequate. What I've had to do is I had to create my own way of creating differentiation in the marketplace and I call it the only statement. So there's so much claptrap around people wanting to be better, people claiming to be best, the market leader number one, etc. And of course, none of that means anything to a customer or potential customer, because they don't believe it anyways. So I created this notion called the only statement, which was really says look, we need to covet, being the only ones that we do not number one, not market leader, but the only. And the interesting thing is, in my work that's the notion that has really captured the imagination in people, because universal selling propositions today don't do the job. Okay, because what they do is they answer the question let's solve a problem, but they forget the next piece that says let's solve the problem in a way that's different than everybody else, because that's the meaningful stuff that makes sense to customers. You know it answers the question why should I do business with you? And so the only statement was a huge part, but there were many other things that really were more of a marketing of business in orientation okay, as opposed to micro marketing stuff, because it dealt with executing a strategy which dealt with operations, which dealt with customer service, which dealt with literally every component of a business to get them working in harmony, lighting fires, achieving things, learning from those and then continuing on. You know, I'm often asked you know, what was the one thing? I go, that's the thing. There's no one thing. There's a whole bunch of small things that you get going and you start executing around them and look at, I had people shaking their heads at me. They say what the hell is this hiring for goosebumps, roy? What are you trying to do? I mean seriously, and it was my way of trying to hire people that liked homo sapiens, because I rationed that. You know, service experiences are all about how people feel and how people are treated. Right, it's not about chat box, for God's sakes, but we can do a whole show on how I feel about AI and all that kind of stuff around service. But it was coming up with these crazy notions that may not have made sense to the pundits, but you know who it made sense to. It made sense to the people in the organization that you were entrusting and empowering to execute on the strategy to deliver extremely high levels of performance. Isn't that what leaders have to do, and so that's the kind of approach I took. I mean, I was in the trenches, man, I got dirty all the time. I wasn't one of these boardroom dudes that served the CEO or the chairman of the board, because that's not where the results were. Results were in the field people on the cold face doing battle and predators and trying to serve customers as best they could. So I'm rambling, okay, because my job here really Eric, was about rambling, trying to find out the simple little things that would turn people on and then being at their side as they tried them right and tweaking it when they didn't work. It was all about that. And we look back and guess what People often say well, how do you know that hiring, cuspump things really work? And I said, if you're asking me to do a linear regression analysis on that one input variable, I'll never do it. What I do know is the combined effect got us a billion. Always come back to that and say you know, I don't know, but we worked hard, we captured people's hearts and we got a billion and boom. I mean, that's what else can you say?

Eric Eden: 6:46

I love it. The only statement is very interesting because a lot of companies that I work with struggle to describe who they are, what they do, why it's different and what they stand for. And if you can't do that, you're really going nowhere fast. That's my contention. And it's hard work to roll up your sleeves and say we're the only one that does this. But I think it's a great insight because I've had those arguments in the conference rooms, the white collar prison, where people try to take the easy way out and say we're number one at this or we're the world's best at this. It sort of falls pretty flat with customers because you know, according to who you know, it's just. It's a very sort of weird way to go at it but saying we're the only ones that do this. That's more achievable if you've come up with something that is remarkable. So let me ask you what was your framing for that company? We're the only ones that do. What was the framing?

Roy Osing: 7:53

Well, rather than go there first, okay, what I need to do is unfold for you the process that I created, Because what I found is and I work with particularly small business clients all the time, and you're right, it's a difficult task to perform and so they need to be guided. But the problem is that most differentiation work today is really another form of narcissism. It's what we think of ourselves, it's who we think we are. Okay, it's not about them. Now, who's them? The second question in my strategy building process is who do you intend to serve? And that's all about target marks, but it's on a very, very small scale, right? And that's based on what kind of growth potential, from a revenue point of view, you expect to get. But it's all based on the who, and I call it the who. And then what we do is we take a deep dive into the who, and you know the question we ask. We don't ask what they need, Because everybody is in the need satisfaction game or trying to exceed them. We ask what do they crave? What are they lust for? What do they desire? What keeps them awake at night? Why do I ask that question? It's because the craving space has virtually no competition and is price insensitive. And look at guys as marketing. Don't we want to be in the premium price business? The problem is when you're trying to satisfy needs, you'll never get there because you've got too much competition and everybody's focusing on price. So my process says who do you want to serve? Let's nail that down. What do they crave? The next question Eric says relative to that group of customers how do we intend to compete and win? That's where the only statement comes in, Because the answer to the question is we're going to compete and win in the who with these cravings that we've articulated by being the only ones who. So it has that context. It's not just what Eric thinks of himself, it's not what Roy thinks of himself, it's what Roy has to be unique at in order to satisfy the cravings of the target market. He's going after Boom, simple. Now the typical answer I get when I say, all right, let's work on this, they say but Roy, I'm not only at anything, I'm not unique at anything, and the challenge there is what I call reframing. So let me give you an example. I just recently completed a consulting gig with a landscaping company and they wanted me to help them with their strategic game plan, which we did. And of course, we get to this section where we're talking about the who, and we got the who down and we decided that the who was going to be what we call up here strata corporations. They're home ownership associations that own, like bear land, strata et cetera, and they have a huge demand for landscaping. So we decided that we're going to do that and we looked at what they crave and then the question came OK, let's create an only statement for these guys. Struggle, struggle, struggle. I mean there's so many landscapers cutting lawns, et cetera. And I said well, what if we thought about your business differently? What if we thought about your business as being the property development business? What would that do for you? Ok, and they go oh my god, that's a really interesting way to look at it and say what if we had an only statement that said we were the only ones who deliver customized property development solutions for strata corporations? If we said it that way, would you be unique? And they just went oh my god. Yeah, so what I'm saying is it's not obvious. People need to be guided and sometimes you have to reframe your business in order to create that only position in the market, but it can be done. Everybody has. There's a buddy of mine called Everybody has a Rembrandt, Eric. Everybody has a Rembrandt in their business. The key is to identify it, wrap it up and display it, and that's what the only statement tries to do. Find your Rembrandt and take it to the marketplace and dissuade people. Ok, put the textbook down on universal, unique selling propositions, people. They don't work. They absolutely don't work. In our particular case, we built an only statement around unleashing the power of the internet by delivering integrated solutions, and we are the only ones that could do that because don't forget, part of the business that's sitting there and everybody was still using voice services, and we are the only ones who actually could take internet capabilities, wrap them around voice, et cetera, and present that to a customer in a unique way, and so that was sort of our basis, but nobody could touch it. All they could do is compete on price. Well, we killed them on price Because we had the highest prices. Why? Because we had the highest value and we're the only ones that did what we do To your audience. Spend some time on this. It's really, really important. Differentiation today is the biggest marketing problem there is, in my humble opinion, Because I don't see any and it can be done through a very specific process. It doesn't take all that long.

Eric Eden: 13:04

So marketing is really about storytelling. I love this concept. The art of storytelling is that everybody has a Rembrandt in them if they take the time to frame it correctly, so I think that's a great challenge for people. What other unheard of or audacious things did you do to get that startup to a billion dollars in sales?

Roy Osing: 13:31

So in no particular order, because this is like kind of like rat-a-tat-tat. We could spend a long time going through this. But I spend an awful lot of time on the culture, because I don't believe that people buy products and services. They buy cultures. They buy service experiences. They buy the belief that somebody's taking care of them. They buy emotional responses. They're feelings people, and people generally buy on feelings. But what the 101 textbook says they buy on how they feel. That's a function of culture. So I spent so much time trying to change the culture from an order-taking. Engineering dominated not there's anything wrong with engineers, but the reality was we were trying to transform the business out of a monopoly into an incredibly intense competitive business. We had to change, and so I spent a lot of time on the culture and there were some little things that I really drilled down on. One was the whole concept of everybody's been taught to create barriers to competitive entry. Every marketing person knows that expression. We need to erect barriers to competitive entry, and I looked at that and said, no, that's wrong. We need to observe what the competitors are doing, but what we really need to do is we need to create barriers to customer exit. Just a little spin and nuance on the word. And what does it mean? It means you allocate your resources to loyalty, you allocate your resources to retention, you allocate your resources to creating the most memorable experiences between the who, ie your target customer and your organization. And that's a cultural thing, because at every touch point you want to create magical moments. And look at marketers. That's the business you're in. You may think you're in a product flogging mode, but you're not. If you want to be really effective, you need to make a difference in terms of how your organization in total performs, and that's a function not of micro marketing techniques. It's a function of macro, organizational performing techniques, and so the notion of reframing our thoughts around the elements that create success organizationally was exceedingly important to me, and I spent a lot of time saying no, no, we're not going to talk about special deals for new customers. I mean, I basically axed that whole concept. I think it's repugnant. I think the fact that you give away service or provide special deals to acquire a new customer that you do not provide to loyal customers is an intellectually dishonest thing that marketers do all the time. Why? Because it's easy. The reality is it's not very effective in terms of long term loyalty. All it does is create promiscuity in terms of your customer base, because if you get me to come to you, eric, for a free television, why do you think I'm not going to go to somebody else if they give me another freebie? And the reality is all that does is enhance customer churn and people go huh, I wonder why we're not growing the business. Well, you're not growing the business because customer acquisition costs are so high and churn is so high because of your silly notion of providing special deals to acquire new customers. I just axed that and said I will never, do not talk to me ever about a special deal To acquire a new customer. That's not what I want. Tell me what we're going to do To keep that base and to grow that base. And so I would introduce a notion of say, it's not about market share, it's about customer share. So what I want to do is grow share of customer. So if you're giving me 50% of your business today as a loyal customer, I want 75, eric. I want it in a month and a half maybe six, but that's what I want. I'm not going after Eric to. I Want Eric number one to grow his business with me, and I'm going to earn it by blowing you away. And so that's the sort of cultural angle that I spent so much time on.

Eric Eden: 17:38

I mean, it was just relentless, just to give you a flavor so a culture of Customer loyalty where you land and expand with a customer is Remarkable in a lot of different ways, because the idea for marketers is, if you just keep bringing fish into the boat but there's a hole at the bottom of the boat, it doesn't matter how many fish you bring in right. So driving loyalty and then Growing your relationship with those customers is probably one of the best ways to grow. I do often see that a Lot of companies don't invest as much on the customer marketing side. They invest more just on raw demand generation, which would probably include a lot of those special offers and deals for new customers. But getting more relationships and deepening relationships with your existing customers is Definitely more cost effective.

Roy Osing: 18:43

The world is all about sustainability, correct? We talk about a sustainable world, sustainable environment Okay, this is about sustainability. Sustainability, okay, focusing on people who have chosen, because they feel good about you, to give you their money on a relentless, almost predictable way, is creating sustainability for your organization and that is a function of sustainable marketing. To put all your eggs in the acquisition basket, in my experience, is Nonsensical, and even if it's not a hundred percent, I mean if you are practicing what I would call asymmetric marketing by overdoing the acquisition side, okay, look at your existing base, isn't stupid. They know what you're doing, right. And you call in, say, well, hey, I'd like that. And they say and you can read it or see it in social media, I'm sorry, reserved for new Customers only now, how does somebody feel when they have been a ten-year long Sustainable customer for an organization? They see an add or hear an add or whatever on social media for a new offer and they try and get it and they're told they can't because you're an existing customer, it's only for new customers. It's absolutely ridiculous and it's a great way to create a lack of customer loyalty. I mean, you will create customer exit by those kinds of programs, and so I always ask myself the question what's driving this? Well, the sort of pedantic Approach the marketing is driving that. Okay, the whole focus on acquisition is sexy as hell. Right, it is sexy as hell. And and and retention is hard work and it's harder, and so the sexy piece gets most of the attention. And unfortunately, my experience has been I didn't get to a billion in annual sales by focusing on acquisition. I got there by picking and choosing and focusing on high-value customers and just Milking them, just building them, grown them, grown them, grown them. I mean milk in the right way, by creating the kind of value that blew them away and they were prepared to pay premium prices for. And the other point I want to make is it's almost impossible To separate marketing from customer service. And yet most of the marketing profession and I was a CMO for a number so I went around with the marketing professionals and the problem is they think that it's they're insular, and the fact is Marketing today is not an insular process, it is not a silo. I mean, it's an integrated part of a whole Organization that's being driven to achieve growth on the revenue side, and so you need to think about the importance of service in that whole concept. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people those sales that we don't need salespeople. Okay, we need people that serve people and if we do that really well, they will take care of us. And it's not about us driving stuff, it's about listening and serving and creating the conditions under which a transaction can occur Seamlessly. And you keep doing that day in and day out.

Eric Eden: 21:49

So the remarkable success a lot of it came from Making customers successful so that they would expand their business versus overweight on Acquisition. Is that right?

Roy Osing: 22:04

Yeah, I mean, look at it, it's all about you and I making a connection, okay, and me convincing you that I can improve your life, I can help you in your life, I can make you happy in your life some way by Transacting the kind of value that I have, and I have to earn that every day. So it's not a one-of-a-kind thing, right? It's like tomorrow, eric, I got to do that for you again and I'm okay with that. And the day after that, because you probably changed and had a different set Of circumstances, I got to do that again. So it's creating that iterative process forever With your existing base. Now, the interesting thing about that is you don't have to do acquisition marketing. If you do this really well, because you get powerful reviews, you get unbelievable referrals and guess what? You, eric, will sell Roy's business. You will do it. If I can do a good job for you, you'll. You'll be my best salesperson. So I don't have to market to try and get new clients. You'll do it for me.

Eric Eden: 23:04

Actually, that's the best marketing I've ever done is when I included my customers to do the marketing for me in terms of Saying what their experience was. By far and away no one wants to hear from a vendor or supplier, but if one of my customers got up and said this was great, it took me half the time to do it I was able to drive double the revenue. People listened. It, hung on every word they said. So one learning I've had is just including cost doing customers in your marketing is one of the best strategies, because People resonate with people that are just like them, right?

Roy Osing: 23:48

Yeah, and the other thing it does is it makes the customer feel important. The very fact that I would recognize you, okay, says to you that, hey, you're important, I think well of you and we have a good relationship, and so it actually has a double-edged sword. Right, it's attractive in terms of the prospect, but it also is one of these loyalty building Tactics to keep you with me as long as I trust you and rely on you and need you. That's all you want to hear, man, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart. That's it. We have gotten so far away from that, eric. Quite frankly, I mean, every time I go on a website and I run into an AI vehicle, it drives me frickin crazy, because all that does is create customer exit for me. Okay, because it has nothing to do with creating a relationship. It has all to do with pushing efficiency and Actually trying to get me to believe that you can formula, rise and algorithm, create an algorithm for me based on Everybody else out there that they're crawling for data, and it just doesn't work. And so you know, I think there's a major challenge for marketing slash service people to be really careful how they use some of these tools because they need to be used within the context of your strategy. And if your strategy is all around Creating experiences and long-term relationships, then the role of that technology is different than if you're a flogger. And the problem is right now, I believe, everybody's using it the flog under the guise of service, sometimes under the guise of being helpful, and I haven't seen them. I haven't seen that technology, any of those technologies, being helpful at all. Hell, I sat on a website this morning trying to get a hold of my newspaper and tell them that that my newspaper hadn't been delivered. Yes, I still. My wife reads newspapers. Okay. So I get on their website and it says are you a robot? So I click I'm not a robot and I wait, and I wait and I wait to watch this little circle go round and round and round and I wanted to see how long it would take. Well, I got tired after 10 minutes, never did complete anything. Now, how do you think I feel about that organization? Is that loyalty building?

Eric Eden: 26:03

Yeah, it doesn't really make. I think there's a lot of discussion about being authentic and being human, which is the opposite of where a lot of the AI tools are today. I mean, the reality is, in five years Maybe they'll be closer, but at this moment they're not there.

Roy Osing: 26:21

So let's, let's talk about that, because I don't believe it'll get closer, because what you're doing is you're you're assuming that it's going to be theoretically possible to create an algorithm, right, that duplicates human behavior and human feelings. And I'm sorry, I'm, I may be from the old school, sorry, but I got a billion in sales, but I'm not there yet. I hope that's the case, eric, but trust me, at the moment I'm not seeing any indication, and One of the reasons for that is the motivation to use the tools is tactical, okay. It's not strategic Okay. They want to drive efficiency, they want to drive more units, sales, get more clients Okay, and, and quite frankly, the roadkill and the collateral damage to the existing base is almost Ignored it's.

Eric Eden: 27:12

It's not there today. I think it's an open question. Will I get there to your point? I think there's a lot of issues with it today, from I'm hallucinating and making things up all the way through the fact that it's not very authentic or very human and it just doesn't provide a great customer experience, like you're saying, in many use cases Today. So I think people should be cautious About how they implement it, like some of the people I talked to you that are their marketers are trying to implement it. I caution them not to put automation in place that they can't. If they're going to use it, they have to have quality checks in place to make sure that you don't get Experiences like the one you just mentioned.

Roy Osing: 27:58

Right, Well, there's a real simple solution to a lot of this. Is you got to have a human available? Okay, take the example that I just had, okay, sitting on that chat thing, that chat bot rat robot thing, for 10 minutes. Okay, why is it such a difficult deal that if I'm on it for more than 30 seconds to have something, send me to a homo sapien. I'll tell you why because they don't want to have a homo sapien sitting there ready to take my call at 6 am when I was up getting ready for our meeting. That's why and so I'm sorry if I sound a bit crusty on this, but look it, I've been doing this for so many years and I'm not seeing, okay, I'm not seeing the willingness to inject the human juice in all of this stuff, and it only leads me to the conclusion that, unfortunately, our discipline, our art of marketing, is not making the kinds of strides that we need To incorporate human juice into the work that we do. That is useful. I mean, we're just mesmerized by technology as it meets. Just all about technology, all about technology. I love technology, but I also believe that it should be expressed within a context, and the problem is right now it's not, and a lot of cases it's being expressed out of context, driven by literally the g-wiz factor of the technology tool itself, as opposed to a strategic purpose, and I quite frankly think that's dismal it's a good reminder that we need to have balance in the force in terms of the relentless pursuit of reducing costs and efficiency and Balancing that with providing a great customer experience, because that's where the sort of growth that gets you a billion dollars Comes from it's.

Eric Eden: 29:45

It's a great reminder. So, roy, I think if people want to know more about this because we have a limited amount of time here you have your grade seventh book be different or be dead. It's on Amazon. I'll link to it in the show description here next to the podcast. I'd like to encourage everyone listening. If you like this episode, please share it with your friends. Roy shared some Amazing insights here that more people should be thinking about. Also, please rate, review and and subscribe so that we can have more great guests like like Roy. Come on the show. Roy, we really appreciate you being here today and sharing these insights with us.

Roy Osing: 30:25

Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to chat about the love of my life marketing.

Intro: 30:33

You've been listening to the remarkable marketing podcast. Our passion is to bring you the marketing rock stars who share stories about the best marketing They've done, how it delivered and how they handled all the challenges that go along with it. And we do it all in 10 minutes. We only asked two things. First, visit the remarkable marketing dot IO website for more great insights. Second, this podcast has been brought to you by the next generation social networking app, workverse. You can download and use the workverse app for free to build your professional brand, become a paid expert advisor and discover the best business events to attend. Download the workverse app today. See you next time on the remarkable marketing podcast.