About Clare Price: Clare Price is CEO of Octain, a marketing consultancy that is transforming the way companies do marketing. She started working remotely in the 1980s as a tech reporter for InformationWeek magazine, and later as a research director for Gartner. Before launching CFP MediaGroup (now Octain), she was Vice President of Research for Demand Metric, a strategic marketing advisory service where she led the research analysis into cloud computing applications for marketing automation, social platforms, and several other products. Clare is the author of two books and an experienced speaker with clients like the American Marketing Association, Vistage, and many others. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Clare.
In this episode, Nancy and Clare discuss the following:
- Octaine Growth Systems – the new force in modern marketing
- Ways to determine the best strategy for each company
- Transitions from trial and error to predictable revenue growth
- Encouraging sales and marketing teams to work together
- Main facts from Clare’s book “Smart Marketing Execution”
- Customer Targeting and Profiling
- AI revolution and why should we be cautious about it
Key Takeaways:
- For most small business owners and fractional consultants, the brand is your reputation.
- We recommend understanding the customer’s Why, not Who the customer is.
- You need to change the way marketing needs to redefine marketing.
- But I do think that the caution is to let AI do the work for you but don’t let it think for you.
- Challenge your assumptions.
“We start with the structure that we’ve developed is what we call a canvas model, and we start with discovery. It is understanding where that company is in terms of what we call the six areas of market acceleration, which are brand development, customer acquisition, message clarity, market expansion, sales enablement, and product innovation. So, we will do a discovery assessment of that company in those six areas to see where they are today, where are their gaps, where are their opportunities, and from that standpoint, then we do an evaluation and recommendations.” – CLARE.
“And what our sales enablement module does is bring the marketing and sales team together to create a unified team. We have a lot of tools that we use to help the team understand each other because you’re more on the sales side, and I’m more on the marketing side. We have different ways of looking at the world, right? So, the marketing person is looking at the forest, and the salesperson is looking at that one tree that is going to give them the clothes they need for that month, right? And so, we have different ways of looking at the world, and we must understand and share each other’s perspectives. So, one of the things that we recommend in the book with our sales enablement module is what we call ride-along: where the marketing person will get in the car. You want to do the physical live ride-along and drive up to the business owner’s door or the virtual ride-along where they are in the Zoom call, and they can see how the salesperson navigates through the sales call. And we feel that that’s a really good way to learn how to walk in each other’s shoes. By contrast, the sales team could also get involved with our sales enablement approach in doing some planning for a marketing event like a conference or putting together a specific piece of collateral or material so that they kind of see, well, how does that marketing person put their magic together?” – CLARE.
“I think there have been a lot of changes, but I think the biggest change is from broadcasting your offer to personalizing, individualizing, and presenting deep individual value to your target. The idea of broadcasting out, we’ve got, you know “Hey, 25% off. Will you get it now?” is not something that a lot of savvy consumers want. And particularly the younger generation, millennials and younger, don’t want to just buy a product or buy a professional service because it’s going to solve a problem. They want to be part of something that’s going to make their life, their community, and the world better. And that’s a big shift.” – CLARE.
Connect with Clare Price:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clareprice/
- Octain Growth Systems:https://octaingrowth.com/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
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Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi everyone, it’s Nancy Calabrese and it’s time again for Conversational Selling, the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Claire Price, the CEO of Octane Growth Systems, a marketing consultancy transforming how companies do marketing. Before launching Octane, Claire was a research director for Gartner’s Internet Strategies Service. She also served as vice president of research for Demand Metric, a strategic marketing advisory service. Her new book, Smart Marketing Execution, defines the strategies, execution process, and automated systems that mid-market companies and agency owners need to use to accelerate their profits, performance, and productivity. Welcome to the show, Claire.
Clare Price: Thank you, Nancy. It’s a pleasure to be here. [1:17]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, so let’s just jump into Octaine Growth Systems. You state that it is the new force in modern marketing. Why is that? Tell us more about it.
Clare Price: Yeah, just to kind of give you a little bit of background, I’d like to share my journey to creating the system. I was a struggling small business owner and someone with both marketing and strategy, background, and knowledge. What I found in working with so many marketing companies and also what I was doing on my own was there’s so much trial-and-error marketing happening. People would throw things out there, hope it worked, didn’t work, roll it back, shift, pivot, throw it up against the wall, see if it sticks kind of mentality. And that was costing all of us so much time and money. And it’s a business killer. It’s an absolute business killer. So over the last 10 years, beginning in 2012, I’ve been on a quest to develop a new way of approaching marketing I call it redefining your marketing engine that allows business owners and fractional consultants like myself to do marketing in a very different way and how is it different it’s different because it combines and integrates strategy what we call smart execution and automation into one marketing operating system most small businesses and don’t do strategy. They just jump in and start by ads or getting their social media out or whatever. And this is a way for them to do a strategy that’s not intimidating, not expensive, and gives them results very quickly. [3:17]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. But how do you determine what strategy is right for what company?
Clare Price: We start with the structure that we’ve developed is what we call a canvas model, and we start with discovery. It is understanding where that company is in terms of what we call the six areas of market acceleration, which are brand development, customer acquisition, message clarity, market expansion, sales enablement, and product innovation. So, we will do a discovery assessment of that company in those six areas to see where they are today, where are their gaps, where are their opportunities, and from that standpoint, then we do an evaluation and recommendations. [4:05]
Nancy Calabrese: So how long does it take for a company to go from trial and error to predictable revenue growth?
Clare Price: We work with them for a minimum of six months. We typically see results after the first three months because as we are developing each of the accelerators, we roll it out. So, it is not the old consulting model where you have a big discovery meeting or two, run away for six months, and then come back with them, and I know Nancy, you’ve had this experience, the THUD factor, the big plan on the desk, right? We don’t do that. We involve our clients in a collaborative, what we call collaborative consulting approach, where they’re building the strategy with us. So, they can see how it works, and what we do, and provide their values, inputs, and processes into it, so it becomes theirs. And as each accelerator rolls out, we start we start seeing results from that. So, they’re continual, it’s a build factor as opposed to waiting for the big reveal and then bringing everything out at once. [5:24]
Nancy Calabrese: You know, it’s funny when I’m listening to you and I know that in my business and I think in your business, it takes time, right, to get the attention, get the word out there. And so, after six months, you say typically they work with you for six months. What happens then? You know, are they on their own or do they continue to work with you?
Clare Price: Well, six months is usually when we complete the planning and rollout. Most of our clients are engaged with us for 12 to 18 months. Some have stayed as long as three years, but beyond that, 12 to 18 months, we want to help them develop their marketing department. We’re not there to become their marketing department. We will help them hire the right people and get the right people in the right seats. We help them automate so that they have the tools to get them out of constant manual rework and into more of an automated system that they can have someone within their company run. [6:29]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, you know, sales and marketing, there’s always the misnomer that there’s a clash, but I think both teams should work together. How do you encourage that? And once they work together as a team, I’m guessing they can deliver higher revenues and profits, you know, lead gen and lead qualification as well.
Clare Price: Absolutely, Nancy. That is our philosophy. That’s why one of the accelerators that we have as part of the system is sales enablement. And what our sales enablement module does is bring the marketing and sales team together to create a unified team. We have a lot of tools that we use to help the team understand each other because you’re more on the sales side, and I’m more on the marketing side. We have different ways of looking at the world, right? So, the marketing person is looking at the forest, and the salesperson is looking at that one tree that is going to give them the clothes they need for that month, right? And so, we have different ways of looking at the world, and we must understand and share each other’s perspectives. So, one of the things that we recommend in the book with our sales enablement module is what we call ride-along. [7:54]
Nancy Calabrese: What a great example, right? It’s true.
Clare Price: where the marketing person will get in the car. You want to do the physical live ride-along and drive up to the business owner’s door or the virtual ride-along where they are in the Zoom call, and they can see how the salesperson navigates through the sales call. And we feel that that’s a really good way to learn how to walk in each other’s shoes. By contrast, the sales team could also get involved with our sales enablement approach in doing some planning for a marketing event like a conference or putting together a specific piece of collateral or material so that they kind of see, well, how does that marketing person put their magic together? [8:46]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, I think that’s a great idea. You know, it often baffled me that there was friction between the two, whereas, you know, if you unite, I think your point is you have to look at it through their eyes, right, and see what their world is like.
Clare Price: Exactly, and I think it’s very important. I think it’s more important now. I’ll be very strong on this I think it’s more important for marketing to understand what the sales world is like Because marketing should be the front line of providing good quality leads to the salespeople. That’s the job of marketing. The job of marketing is not to create wonderful; you know branding and get brand recognition with their wonderful logos and all of that stuff. The real honest job of marketing is to provide good quality leads to the sales team that they can close. [9:49]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, let’s talk more about your book, Smart Marketing Execution. What motivated you to write it? And talk about the strategies that you recommend in the book.
Clare Price: Thank you, Nancy. What motivated me to write it was trying to put a lot of the tools strategies and frameworks that I’ve been using with my clients into an easy-to-digest system or book that someone could pick up and use and drive for their own business. So, what I tried to do in the book was again, lay out those key accelerator’s examples of the tools that we use. And my philosophy on this is really, it should be a guide, a guidebook. This should be a journey guide for anyone who wants to change or consider changing the old way of doing marketing. So, we try to take everyone step by step through the process. Why do you want to do this, why do you want to create a brand? A lot, there’s just one example there’s a lot of misconceptions about what is a brand and why you need one. For most small business owners and fractional consultants, the brand is your reputation. It’s not what we think of when we think of you know, Tide or Google or Apple or one of those big, you know, brands. If you’re a smaller mid-size company business owner or you’re a fractional consultant, your brand is your reputation. When you walk into a room, do people know you? When you hand your business card off to people, whether it’s digitally or in person, is it recognizable? Will people see you in the community? Those are the kinds of things that we talk to our clients about and our consultants about in building a brand. And we’ve walked through that very carefully in the book. The other thing that I think that I wanted to point out is that’s, I think, the secret sauce in the book is the way that we manage client and customer targeting and profiling. Because most of the time, the typical marketing approach to your ideal customer is, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, Nancy, an agency, or someone will come to you who’s doing a website and say, okay, who’s your ideal client? And you give them three or four or five facts about who that ideal client is. Typically, those facts are demographics. They are, okay, that’s a certain size company, certain role in the company, certain industry, geographic location, right? Well, I have a marketing guru friend who said, I think one of the most spectacular comments about demographics you ever want to hear. Her comment was demographics are the least useful thing that you need to know about your customer. Because after all, who wants to get an email saying, dear female, 25 to 55, here is our offer? [13:11]
Nancy Calabrese: Ha Ha. Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. So, yeah, what do you recommend?
Clare Price: So, what we do, what we recommend is understanding the customers why. We spend a lot of time understanding, not who that customer is. Of course, we must know that. There must be that front-line or foundational profile. But why do they buy? What motivates them? What are their true needs, desires, and wants? What do they value? because if they value something, like for example, use a typical example. If someone is motivated to lose weight, they’re going to value diet programs, diet counseling, diet, workouts, personal trainers, that whole thing. If they’re motivated to drive their business into a new geographic area, which is a plant that we’re working on. But now they value understanding that new market and how to quickly become the mayor of that new market space. [14:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. You know, you talked a few minutes ago about the old way of marketing. How has marketing changed?
Clare Price: I think there have been a lot of changes, but I think the biggest change is from broadcasting your offer to personalizing, individualizing, and presenting deep individual value to your target. The idea of broadcasting out, we’ve got, you know “Hey, 25% off. Will you get it now?” is not something that a lot of savvy consumers want. And particularly the younger generation, millennials and younger, don’t want to just buy a product or buy a professional service because it’s going to solve a problem. They want to be part of something that’s going to make their life, their community, and the world better. And that’s a big shift. [15:38]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. How long has that been going on? You know, the change or the shift?
Clare Price: I would say that we’ve really been seeing the social responsibility shift heavily growing and becoming a huge trend. I’m going to guess here maybe five years, maybe longer, but five years.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Okay, so little change of questioning. Tell me a fun fact about you.
Clare Price: Well, we started out talking about our dogs, right? So, my fun fact is that for a good part of the last 10 years or so, I have been very active in a competitive dog sport called dog agility. I’ve taken two dogs to the master’s level in dog agility I trained with in Sacramento, California, trained with one of the top trainers in the sport and I just love dog sports. And so that was a fun thing for me. Unfortunately, like a lot of the football players and basketball players out there, I had a career-ending injury a couple of years ago and I can no longer run because I broke my knee. So, I’m working with my new puppy in obedience and rally and things that are not so athletically required. [17:08]
Nancy Calabrese: That is so cool, so cool. And folks, when you check out Claire’s website, you’re going to see which dog is on your team on the site.
Clare Price: That is ours, that’s my new puppy, Ashton. He is 14 months old, and he is our chief happiness officer.
Nancy Calabrese: I love it. All right. So, getting back to you and what you do, tell me something true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Clare Price: That is a very, very interesting question. And I would say that would be how you need to change the way marketing needs to redefine marketing. I think there’s a lot of resistance to that. People are used to doing it the way they’ve done it, especially if they’ve been profitable at it. And I think that a lot of people are used to people who are kind of stuck in that old way of doing marketing, the old way of building their business are going to get caught. The other thing, as I’m thinking about, is the other thing that I think people may not agree with me on, I think you’ve got to be very cautious about this new AI revolution. I think that there is a lot of good there. But there’s also a tendency to let it do too much of the work for you. Let it do, here’s my advice on AI. I’m doing a lot of work with AI in my own business and working with clients and been doing a ton of research on it lately. Nancy, and it’s a huge new thing, right? But I do think that the caution is to let it do the work for you but don’t let it think for you. [19:02]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, I like that. Yep. I mean, in thinking about what you just said, it’s true. I mean, if it’s a jumpstart, I think AI could be used as a jumpstart, right? And then you must make it your own. Yeah, wow. Listen, we’re up with our time and this has been a fascinating discussion. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Clare Price: Absolutely. Challenge your assumptions. And then I also wanted to, if it’s OK with you, offer the audience the opportunity to download a free chapter of my book. And, I have a brainstorming call with me. Yeah, they go to octaingrowth.com. And that is https://octaingrowth.com/myoffer/ .
Nancy Calabrese: Okay, well, you heard it folks. I think that’s a very generous offer. So please take advantage of it. Claire, you’re a fascinating lady. And I also know you love birds. But I thought you were going to bring that one up, but that’s for another conversation, okay? Yes, and everyone out there, make it a great sales day. And I’m going to say a sales and marketing day. See you next time. [20:32]
