Ep #131: Why Prospects Don't Care About Your Pitch?

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey:  In this episode, I’m going to talk to you about why prospects just don’t seem to care about what you’re offering and why they don’t really believe that you can help them and why they’re making stupid decisions of hiring AI platforms or signing up with agencies or vendors selling stuff that they don’t need and why they’re not actually doing the thing that they do need, which is to hire you. That’s what we’re talking about. Let’s go.  

00:00:22 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over?  And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up. And companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer.  It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck.  It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton.  Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract,  convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients  on your terms.

00:01:19 Casey: All right, welcome back. Happy new year. I’m thrilled to be back here with you 2026. This is going to be a big year for you. I can feel it.  And I want to walk you through some of the thoughts that have in my mind. This episode is just like, I’ve got about kind of five different thoughts here that I want to share with you.  They’re going to help you set yourself up for success as a fractional CMO in 2026. Also at the end, I’m going to invite you to a webinar that I’m hosting. You should just RSVP for right now. Go to cmox.co/webinar and sign up for the webinar. We’ve got a very exciting webinar that I’m doing a lot of work to prepare for, uh, that’s going on later this month. So please go to that page right now and sign up for it. cmox.co/webinar. 

00:01:59 Casey: Okay. So let’s talk about you. Talk about why your prospects don’t seem to care about your pitch.  Man. Isn’t that direct? Isn’t that painful? Have you talked to someone and they just don’t care or get it. And you want to be like, brother, what I am selling you is salvation. Like, can you give me a minute of your time? And they just can’t. They just won’t hear it in the way that you want to articulate it. And there’s something wrong. And this happens like when you’re on a call with someone and they’re like, oh, that sounds interesting. 

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe we can talk about it later. It’s like, it just kind of falls flat. Like something happens in the conversation with the prospect that shows you that they think you’re talking about something that you’re not, or they don’t have the emotional attachment to it that you think they ought to have based on where they are. It’s like, there’s just a disconnect there. And I want to talk about how to create that connection. 

00:02:46 Casey: So I think the first thing is that you don’t know your audience well enough. That’s a fact. You don’t know your audience well enough. You don’t know their pains. You don’t speak their language. You appear out of nowhere talking to these people like the Steve Buschemi meme where he’s an adult dressed up with a red hat on backwards and kind of like an AC/DC style shirt that just says music band on it and like a red zippy. And he’s holding a skateboard over his shoulder and he says, how do you do fellow kids? That’s what you look like. Right? You just like show up as this person who is an absolute outsider, trying to pretend that you’re an insider, but you don’t know these people’s pains. You don’t know what they’re experiencing and you’re talking. Like when I say to you, like,  if I were to ask you, it’s like, Oh, what pains are your clients in? And you would say something to me like, well, they’re spending money on marketing, but it’s just not working. 

00:03:37 Casey: Man, that is the most unemotional thing that you could say around it. Like there’s spending money that’s not working. Like something’s going on that’s deeper than this.  Like you need to know the language. You need to be in. Have you ever been in a club? A society? Like where there’s the people on the inside and people on the outside. All right. Nerd time. Ham radio, right? I’m into it. I know the difference between an iambic paddle and a cootie and a bug and a straight key. Those are like the four different Morse code keys. Right? I know them and I can use them intelligently in conversation. Right? I’d like understand the history of the telegraph. I can articulate things about that that make sense.  Two years ago, no idea. Today, I know a bit about them. I have a couple of those keys. There’s a difference. 

00:04:23 Casey: I was an outsider who had to learn and spend time and like struggle to kind of learn like it wasn’t easy to get to a point of like actually understanding it and like having kind of a catalog in my brain of how these things work. Apply that to your clients. Apply that to the industry that you want to be in. So then you say to me, Casey, well, my industry is, I don’t know,  B2B. My industry is SaaS. My industry is healthcare. My goodness, like that industry is like saying, I can help everyone in the state of Texas grow their business. You probably can’t.  And when you talk at that level of  generalities, you’re like talking to nobody. There’s nothing about you that’s interesting or spicy or just like exciting. There’s no breath of fresh air. There’s no you to it. It’s just like, I want business, do you have business for me? It feels really weak. So you got to know their pains. Let’s talk about real pains that business owners have. 

00:05:18 Casey: I mean, there’s all sorts of pains. There’s the pain of embarrassment. And that comes in the form of someone being the first to market  and lose their edge. And now they’re second place, third place, whatever. And they’re embarrassed. Like that’s a pain. Another pain is they’ve got a world-class product or service. And no one’s using it. No one’s seeing it. No one gets it. Like they’re in their invention chamber. They’re at their, you know, wherever they go to create and they’ve come up with something so great and they know that this will change everything and people just don’t get it. That’s a real pain. I dabble in the franchise space and in franchise, there is a franchise disclosure document. 

00:06:01 Casey: This is the document that you get to ultimately when you’re a franchise candidate, you want to start a franchise location like, Oh, I want to start a Subway. want to start a Radio Shack. I want to start with whatever. You would go through a process to be qualified and then you would get the franchise disclosure document, the FDD, and you’d review it. Item 20 in the FDD states effectively the successes and failures of other franchisees in the system. So I’ll tell you when a franchisor has 20 locations that are open and they’re kind of just getting off the ground, right? They’re not really well built out, they’re not very stable. They’re probably not even making any money as the franchisor. 

00:06:41 Casey: That item 20 starts to become something that they’re worried about because that first two franchise partners that they launched with, they didn’t know what they were selling them. They did the best they could, but they didn’t do a good job in retrospect. And now those two locations are struggling  and they’re thinking, oh shoot, we got to update the FDD for the new year and it’s going to not look good. Right? We’re starting to tell, we’ve been still telling a hopeful story and now we’re going to be telling a the things aren’t as bad as they look  story, right? That’s a real pain that they have. Oh my goodness, that’s a pain. What else is a pain? 

00:07:14 Casey: Have you heard of the consulting firm McKinsey or Romney’s firm? Those are the big firms, the big consulting firms.  And when Romney was going to, you know, when he was in the process to be  voted on to maybe be the president  during the election, he was interviewed and I’ll kind of get this wrong, but someone said to him, you know, what would you do about the national debt? And he said, I would bring in McKinsey or Bain. Like that’s what he said. He said, I will give smart people the responsibility to solve the problem. And I think it’s an interesting approach. It certainly is a very business-y approach to like bring in a consulting firm that does all this research. And then they kind of propose the solution. But if you know anything about like the  HBO showtime merger, brand rebrand, unbrand thing, you HBO died.

00:08:02 Casey: It was just called Max for a while and then they brought back HBO and they, I think they paid McKinsey like a ton of money all along the way from, to like consistently make bad decisions only to get us back to HBO. We see business owners say, I’ll bring in a top dollar consultant, consulting firm, expert, whatever, and they’re going to tell me the solution. And if they’re wrong, it’s their fault. It’s a plausible deniability that exists. And it makes sense  if there’s a board, especially.

00:08:31 Casey: Because then the CEO says, Hey, I hired McKinsey. What do you mean I made a bad decision? You’re telling me there’s someone better than Bain or McKinsey. Right. They can have that plausible liability. That stuff does happen in business. Business owners get to a point where they’ve made bad decisions, but they’ve kind of given the responsibility of that outcome to someone else and they can blame that person, which at one level feels okay to them. But on the other side, they’re like, well, but things didn’t work out. So it’s actually, it is bad, but they’re feeling burnt out by this. They’re feeling… They said, I did the thing that everyone says to do, overpay for the smartest people and then they’re going to give us the right answer. And they overpaid and I got the wrong answer. That happens. That’s a real pain people experience. 

00:09:13 Casey: What are other pains that people have? I’ll tell you, the CEO is working too damn much.  They’re working too hard, too many late nights and their marriage is on the rocks. That’s a big one. Man, if like the spouse isn’t folded into the business,  the CEO oftentimes can struggle with personal life. It’s a big deal. They’re on calls they don’t want to be on. They’re getting stress from customers that they don’t want or regulators or whatever. And they want someone else to have that. They want strata between where they are and the pain of the customer or whatever. Like they just want to be insulated a bit, right?

00:09:48 Casey: They want it to go do like the big thinking. They want to think about their merger and acquisition that they’re planning for next year. They want to think about the relationships that they’re working, you know, at the country club, because those actually matter on a  bigger picture scale. That’s what’s going to double the company. I don’t want to deal with getting caught in the quagmire of like the day to day, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like just the noise of it all. So these business owners have real pains. What are your clients’ pains? Really, what are they? Like actual visceral pains.  Like nobody wakes up January 1st and says, oh, I should lose weight. Right? 

00:10:25 Casey: They don’t say that they have a pain that’s associated with it that is significant in their mind. They think about family. think about their health. Think about, I’m not going to be able to see my kids grow up or my grandkids grow up, or I won’t be able to pick up anything heavy, or I’m going to need someone to wheel me around in a wheelchair or whatever their thing is. They have a real significant pain that they get to. I’m embarrassed about going to certain places, wearing certain things. There’s a visceral pain. No one says I want to lose weight. They say, I don’t want this pain.  And therefore the action step, let’s say, is to lose weight. Okay. And that’s just an example.  

00:11:03 Casey: I want to make more money. It’s like, do you want to make more money or do you want to be the person who has power  and influence because of the money that they have? No one wants more money. They want the power and influence that comes with more money. Even if it’s them going from 50 grand a year to a hundred grand a year, they’re growing in their power and their influence in their mind and probably in their experience of life too.

00:11:25 Casey: I always kind of harken back to this thought that generally speaking, you know, I’m sure that this isn’t perfectly said, but men tend to want power and women tend to want youth and beauty. Okay. Like it or not. Are there women that want power? Absolutely. Are there men that want youth and beauty? Absolutely. Can we just say that? I don’t know. I don’t know if we can. I don’t know if it’s fair, right?  It doesn’t feel great to say it out loud, but those are basic human emotions, power, influence, freedom,  youth, beauty.  The fountain of youth was something that’s like, of like, hail as old as time. That’s what people have wanted. 

00:12:03 Casey: So just, I would encourage you to accept that what people ultimately want is power, influence, youth, beauty. Like that’s really where they want to be. Freedom. That’s what they want. People don’t want to start their own business. They want freedom to do whatever they want to do. And that may include starting their own business. People don’t want a fractional CMO. They want the power that comes from a company that’s scaling faster. Right. They want the influence that comes from hitting that Inc 5000 list five years in a row. They want the influence of being able to hire the best people and being like just like the King Kong of their industry. That’s where they want to be. Right. They don’t want a fractional CMO. It’s not about you. It’s about what you do for them. You got to know the industry with depth and you got to know their paints.

00:12:53 Casey: I want to tell you a brief story. was on a call years ago, back when I was at the agency and I was on with a buddy of mine, Bill, still a great friend of mine. And Bill and I were selling Fractional CMO and Fractional CTO services together. And we had a company that we called Engaged Officers, EO. And it was a fun idea because we wanted to kind of work together and it was fine. You know, we made some decent money. But I remember we got on a call with a prospect and I tended to lead the sales calls and he was like the technical guy. He’s super great on the tech side. And he got good at sales too, but uh at the beginning I was definitely leading the sales calls.  

00:13:30 Casey: And  when we were on with someone, the guy was in the private plane space and it was like private planes taking you. was private planes. It was private planes. think just that was it. Kind of like a next jets. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was in the private plane business. So I think it was like private plane rentals, like get a seat from here to there, you know, whatever.  And planes go to  FBOs. That’s what they call like a small airport. And FBOs are kind of like where private jets fly into.  I mean, as you can imagine, like a private jet,  it’s going to be harder for it to get space at LaGuardia. Because LaGuardia is going to let 500 souls aboard one plane land before they let five souls on another plane land. You know?

00:14:13 Casey: So these FBOs are where the private jets  go, where they’re stored. And in the conversation, I said to the guy, yeah, something around like an FOB. Yeah, there’s an FOB near me. He says, an FOB, do you need an FBO? And I said, I was like, I think so. And he’s like, okay, it’s clear to me that you don’t know what we’re talking about. And I was like, oh shit, he’s right. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know it. I don’t know that space. Before that call, could I have done some research? Yeah. And now we can do research better. And maybe you have like some note taker that’s giving you answers and feeding you garbage to talk about on the sales calls. I totally flubbed it. Like I lost the deal right then and there. The dude kind of laughed in my face. And rightly so. Rightly so. I was the wrong person because I didn’t know the industry. 

00:15:03 Casey: Could I help him? Am I creative given the opportunity? Sure. Did he want someone without experience? Absolutely not. Did he want someone that understood general travel? No, he wanted someone that understood the private, plain, ultra wealthy, you know, approach to like getting more clients. That’s what he wanted. And I wasn’t the guy and he could see through that. And the more experienced the entrepreneur is, the more they want the person who actually solves the problem in depth. Let me ask you this one. If you said, Hey, it’s been my lifelong vision to start a coffee shop. I’d say that sounds awesome. I hope you have a really great espresso machine at stopping by and have one, you know, maybe you could do espresso tonics. You’ve got these ideas for the baked goods that you want. Great. 

00:15:48 Casey: Say, okay, what have you done to like plan for this? You’re like, you know, I’ve been really working on my espresso. Like, you know, I know all about these different espresso machines. I’ve got a relationship with a company that can get me green beans so we could do roasting. Like you’re talking through all that stuff. Like, cool, cool, cool. What do you know about the business of coffee shops? You’re like, I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident I could find out. Okay. What’s your next step?

00:16:10 Casey: You’re like, I’m going to start looking for a place to open up a coffee shop. I’ll just stop you right there and be like, no, how about we go find 10 coffee shop owners in the city, in the state, in similar cities. And you just say, Hey, I’m starting a coffee shop. I’m really passionate about it. Can I talk with you for like an hour? And would you just give me like the good, bad, ugly? Would you just like, give me the details of what’s going on? And you know, you approach 10 and maybe you get three or four people to say yes. Maybe you them a couple bucks, throw them a hundred bucks for their time, whatever. 

00:16:45 Casey: But you’re to go ask them the question, what is it like to open a coffee shop? Where do you get your beans from? What’s a problem that you didn’t think you would have that is now a bigger problem than you imagined? What’s more expensive than you thought? What’s been harder than you thought? Talk to me about like regulation. Talk to me about opening time. How long did it take you to get your permits? How much work did you do to, you know, overhaul your space before you open?

00:17:05 Casey: Do you offer free Wi-Fi? What do you do for power? Like all these questions you can ask these people that are fast paced and get a really great answer. And that gives you a sense of Intel into what’s happening in that industry. And if you’re not going after anyone that’s competitive, you don’t ask the guy down the street who’s half of the business, you’re going to try to steal when you open up your coffee shop. But instead you’re just asking questions and like that to someone in a different state or whatever, like these people are going to be eager to share their experience and maybe even just kind of complain at you for a while on why it was a big mistake. And maybe that gives you the insights. 

00:17:39 Casey: Do you need to open the coffee shop correctly or to choose another path? You know, both of which are fine. Yet  when I see CMOs on the internet claim like, I’m a fractional CMO for this space. They just like, they don’t talk to the pains of the business. They don’t understand it. They don’t appreciate it. They might’ve spent time as a marketer in the industry. So let’s say it’s in health tech,  specifically SaaS, like consumer health SaaS. They understand that space. They understand HIPAA regulations. They work closely with developers, all that stuff. Great. Like they might be an expert in that, but what they lack is an understanding of the experience of the CEO or the business owner. And therefore they’re saying, Hey, yeah, I work great with developers and we can, you know, we can make sure that we’re HIPAA compliant on our CRM so that our attribution can be fed back to the conversion API and that they’re going to say all that stuff. 

00:18:35 Casey: And the CEO is just like,  man, like that’s not what I’m looking for. That’s not the thing that solves a problem on my mind. And they may not be able to articulate it, but they’re looking for someone who understands their pains and tries to help them kind of solve that problem. Help that entrepreneur get back to a place of influence, power, freedom,  beauty, youth, right? Like that’s where we want to get our entrepreneurs. So if you don’t know the industry, you gotta go figure it out. That’s it. Like you gotta go and be a student of the industry and be a real student, consume all the content that you can. And you say, what do I do? It’s like, what would you tell someone else? 

00:19:15 Casey: You’re smart. You’re listening to this podcast. You know what to do. It’s like the thing on health and fitness. Do you know how to eat healthy? Do you know what kind of fitness is required? Like you’re probably, you probably have like 80, 90, 95% of everything you should do, you know. Like, okay, lift heavy weights a couple of times a week. Yeah. Probably walk 10,000 steps. Probably eat like a high protein diet. Like done. Right. That’s like a majority of what you have to do. That’s it. So you know what to do to become an expert in an industry. Come into it and do it and don’t do it just today. Don’t do it just tomorrow. Become infatuated, become interested.

00:19:55 Casey: Understand the movers and the shakers, right? Leverage AI as needed to help you with this, but don’t leverage AI to know it, leverage AI to teach it to you. You can’t offload your brain  storage to AI. Right? That’s not the game here. The game is to actually know it and be the person that knows it. You know, I have recorded an episode recently on becoming a Renaissance man or Renaissance woman and I think that’s critical here. Like you have to be the person that knows how to do these things. You have to understand how the market works. You can’t be this person who’s just like plugged into AI and just reading what AI says. 

00:20:30 Casey: You’re like a newscaster who’s just like reading cue cards that someone else wrote for you. Like you’re just a pretty face that’s yapping. I want you to be a critical mind that’s thinking, that’s innovating, that’s trying. That’s where you got to be.  That’s so important. And it’s to go beyond the  realm of copying what others are doing and go into the realm of iterating and testing and creating and inventing new things to work for your clients. Yeah, I can take things that worked for a client and like apply it to another client and like everyone does well. I really want to be the guy who innovates the new thing that really helps the client get to the next level really blows up. That’s where you want to be. 

00:21:08 Casey: You want to be in that space of innovation and you can only be there with a depth of knowledge for how things work, your client, their pains, the market with the markets demanding what’s happening with the wars, how they affect your client, what happens with, I mean… all the things that are happening in the market, you kind of want to just know how that applies to your industry. That’s why I don’t want to be in five industries. I want to be in one industry. A hard enough time following the news for one industry that’s fast moving. So why would I say I want to be in a massive industry like  SaaS or B2B SaaS or healthcare or health tech?

00:21:45 Casey: I want more specificity than that so I can become an expert there. And that expert knows when companies are getting funding and they know when companies are launching products and what their offers are and the software that they use. Like that’s the kind of stuff you want to be an expert on. That makes you better. Even if you don’t tap into that knowledge directly, know, tangentially, you’re able to iterate ideas that you share to your client that are based on the Intel that you have that you’ve collected because you took this seriously and you became the kind of CMO that gets shit done that knows what to do that like is thinking critically, thinking big picture. Right. So prospects don’t care about you because you’re not talking to their pains. 

00:22:22 Casey: Prospects don’t care about you because you’re not speaking their language. Prospects want you to be the South for their burn, the Rosetta Stone for their translation. They’re looking for you to be the person that actually solves a specific problem. I think of tools,  you know, I’ve got a really nice pair of calipers. If you know calipers, can like measure the width of things like the width of a piece of paper. And I think mine are Miyoto, I think that’s the name of it. And they’re beautiful. And they were like a little expensive. They weren’t terribly expensive, but there were definitely cheaper calipers that existed. But I got the really nice ones. And I’ll tell you, they are the perfect tool for the job when I measure stuff. Like the perfect tool. And they don’t do anything else well. They’re a terrible beer bottle opener, right? They’re an awful hammer.

00:23:13 Casey: But when it comes to measuring the thickness  of the interior  diameter of a pipe that I want to replace, or the thickness of something, they’re perfect. And there’s no better tool that exists. I want you to see yourself as a specialized tool in that way. You want to not go sell everybody that you can help, but say, I can help you if you have these specific traits. And if they do, my goodness, you are the best thing that could happen to them. The problem is that you failed to zero in on who you’re a perfect fit for. And therefore, when you talk to everybody, you land like milk toast. They just don’t get it. They don’t understand. They don’t care because they don’t hear that you’re solving the problem that they have. 

00:23:58 Casey: When you speak their language, when you can articulate effectively why you’re the best, everything changes. It’s a big deal to be able to do this. It is literally the difference between doing all of the work to win clients and not getting clients versus getting clients. Now, I think it’s fair to say that you could probably get some clients that are less experienced, that are willing to take a risk on you, that you’re in their personal network and therefore, you know, that’s good. And you’re not the best. They don’t know any better.  Because marketing is so foreign to them that anyone that says marketing three times  in one sentence to them feels like a genius, right? So like, maybe they’re going to hire you for that reason, or maybe there’s closeness or someone recommended you or something like that. 

00:24:38 Casey: But the more experienced the executive, the less likely they’re going to hire someone who isn’t the best. So you have to be on a path to be great. You got to turn pro. You can’t just play on the sidelines and wish and hope. You got to go pro. That’s where you got to be. I mean, I’m saying this to you with two kids, a wife, a house,  a dog, three cats,  and that he’s doing great by the way. I’ve got a busy life.  Someone else could learn about an industry faster than me. Absolutely. Someone else has more time than me. I very little time.

Right? Just, have a busy life. So to like learn a new client would take, or a new industry would take a long time. That doesn’t mean I won’t do it. Right?

00:25:22 Casey: I’m still going to do it. What you could do because you’re single  or your kids are out of the house, or you just have more time because you’re unemployed or whatever your thing is. You can learn faster than me. Fine. That’s an upper hand that you have on me, but I’m going to grind it out. Maybe it takes me a month to get to what you could do in a week. I’m going to keep going month after month after month. I’m going to keep grinding at it. It’s the people that give up. It’s these people that have the capacity and then let it go. They have the time and they say, ah I’m going go play with this other thing. I’m going to do this other thing. 

00:25:57 Casey: Oh, my buddy just announced this new debt fund. want to get in on that. Oh, this sounds like a fun business for me to start. Ooh, I should go start an N8N meets make.com automation studio. Whatever the thing is. If you’re not staying long enough in the game, you’re not going to be great. was recently approached by a guy that I’ve known for years. I’ve seen him at events, masterminds, client events, that kind of stuff. And he’s like in the operation space and he ran ops for uh some folks that I knew that that I, that I know.  And we kind of fell out of touch over the last few years, you know, I mean, kids will do that.  And he reached out to me recently and he’s doing the same thing.

00:26:36 Casey: And I said a note to him and I was like, dude, I am  scared that you might be one of the best at the game now. Like he was good then and now he’s got another six years in the same uh type of role. He’s got to be really good by now, right? Like really, really good.  I’m worried about the guy, about the woman who is spending more time than everybody else. Like those people are the ones that are the dangerous ones. Those are the ones that are going to win long-term. They’re just focused, they’re committed, they’re going to do it.

00:27:05 Casey: And things come and go, you know, like, I mean, my month of August, with my dad passing was just awful, right? September, October, November, December, you know, it’s just like, I get a lot of extra stuff in my life done? Absolutely not. No way. I’m going to keep grinding, you know, the pain’s a little less right now today. So I can grind a little bit right now. I can keep going. And that’s what’s going to make you win. just like that commitment over time to not stop. Cause what else are you going to do? Go get a job somewhere until what? They let you go. They exit. You get a package and then what? Like, what are you doing? Build this thing for yourself. Take the long-term approach. 

00:27:47 Casey: I don’t care if you close your first client in January, or you close your first client next January. I don’t care. I care that you’re committed to it. You do it at the rate that is sustainable for you. I think there’s also utility in taking a vacation to only work on getting yourself to the next level in anything in your life. You want to get better in health and fitness? Go take a vacation. What? Go take like a week vacation and only consume stuff around health and fitness. I bet you’re going to get to the next level. Everyone that you probably know,  maybe you included, that have kids,  spent a period of their time cramming, like learning all that they could. Like what do they do? 

00:28:31 Casey: They’re like, okay, well, we’re having a kid. now we’ve got to look up, what’s a safe place for kids to sleep. Okay. What’s a good car seat? Every parent today seems to be an expert in car seat safety. seem to be an expert in safe sleep. They know their ABCs of safe sleep. know printer tape, like from a receipt printer has, PFAS on it and you shouldn’t give that to a kid, right? They’re like, they know these nuances that they never knew before. Did they learn it all in one day? No.

00:28:58 Casey: Maybe they bought a course on safe sleep. Maybe they bought a course on the first six months with a kid and they like watch that and that helped them. But they didn’t learn it all overnight. They committed to a long-term approach. And as the kids got older, they had to go from  safe sleep to feeding solids to, you know, what’s the next step? Reading to your kids,  teaching your kids, uh having a house where your kids aren’t constantly glued to devices. Right? It’s like all these different steps, all the way to like  dating help when they’re in their teens, like the parents’ job never stops and they get better and better and better. I mean, their job is, you know, for their whole life. 

00:29:37 Casey: Yet we think that like, when we started Fractal CMO business that like, we can just learn the tricks in a week and then be off to the races. You have to be a student of your industry and understand it deeply. But that’s the critical thing here. But here’s another problem. Nobody cares about you because nobody knows who you are. You’re a nobody to all of these people. Like if you join the accelerator, one of the first things that we do is like, I personally help you get a list of target clients for you to do direct outreach to, to meet, to know. It’s like your target audience to go win as clients. And it’s very clear. It’s like inside of that audience that I give you is all of the money you could ever want in life. 

00:30:18 Casey: The question is, are you willing to go get it?  One of the ways that you have to go get it is you have to announce yourself, hey, I’m this person and I solve these problems. And again, you solve the problem that they have, not the  lame  flat, I help people who’ve spent money on marketing and it just didn’t work. And now I can help make it work. Not that garbage. You actually talk to them about the specific problem that they’re facing. get almost emotional with that level of  directness that you have with them. That’s what they’re looking for. That’s what they want from you. So you go post on LinkedIn, you go post on Facebook, you share with a couple of your colleagues, kind of what you’re doing. Nobody cares.  Nobody cares until you go pro on it.

00:30:56 Casey: Like until you are serious and this is all you’re talking about publicly and you’ve kind of like taking your image and you’ve kind of simplified it down to these core things. That’s what you talk about. That’s stuff that’s important to you  publicly. I mean, you think of anyone who’s worked with anyone. I love the entrepreneur Dan Sullivan. I think Dan’s done really great work as a strategic coach to really push the conversation forward around being a business owner who is successful and creative and having fun. And in Dan’s approach, he started with financial advisor in like Chicago and Toronto. And that was it. And then over years, I don’t know if he grew to different cities first or if he opened it up to non-financial advisors, but he stayed simple and focused. He won a huge book of business with financial advisors and they came to him for coaching every single quarter. And they still do. I mean, I there’s people that have been with Dan for decades, which is nuts. It’s like he went wide.

00:31:55 Casey: Cause now anyone who’s doing, you know, at least $500,000 take home or a million dollars take home, they can go hang out with Dan. You know, got to pay the top dollar to be in Dan’s group. Dan created a culture where people followed what he was doing and were successful. And he was able to create more content and coaching to support these people. But he couldn’t start with everybody all at once. He had to start with financial advisors. I mean, I think when I was in coach, I don’t know, at least a third of my group or financial advisors, maybe a half of my group were still financial advisors. It’s kind of crazy, right? 

00:32:29 Casey: So start with specificity and then later, sure, you can branch out and kind of become someone that does other stuff.  If you follow the entrepreneur Dan Martel, I like Dan’s work a lot. Dan was heavy into SaaS. He started up his own SaaS companies. He sold them. Then he taught people how to like build and sell their SaaS companies. And now he teaches a much more broad approach to buying back your time and how to be in control and healthy as an entrepreneur. If you started with that message, everyone’s like, who are you dude? But he started with specificity. He started with like the things inside of his control. And then he kind of went one level above that, then a level above that. 

00:33:08 Casey: And now he’s on this next level, which is even bigger, but he couldn’t just walk into that level. That’s it for you. You can’t say I work with medical devices. You have to say I work very specifically with these types of devices that are going through these types of, you know, approval processes with this kind of funding for application for women in obstetrics. Like you want to be highly specific. The more specificity, the more you become the only yes, yess-able prospect for them to work with. These companies want to work with the right person. So you want to niche down, but then you to go talk to them. You got to go talk to people. If I gave you that list and I told you all the money you could ever want is in their pockets, what are you going to go do?

00:33:48 Casey: Like for some people, they need to be down and out. They need to be like down to their last dollar to say, damn it, I’m going to stop waiting for other people to save me I’m going to do it myself. Other people, they don’t need that painful of a lesson and they just show up and say, cool, I’m going to do it for myself because I want to do it. And they do it and they fight and they work hard and they meet these people, create real relationships. I’m not selling you get rich quickly as a fractional CMO. Though some of you can land your first client at $10,000 a month and that’s awesome, right? Get a couple of those, you’re doing really well.

00:34:18 Casey: But if you want to build from the ground up, if you’re starting with nothing, you do it like you can’t tap your network because of a non-compete and you don’t want to fight it. You can’t promote on LinkedIn because you don’t want your employer to see, cause you’re trying to do this on the side. Whatever your thing is, right? You’re an agency owner, but you don’t want to tell people you’re doing fractional CMO thing until you actually like try it out and make sure that it really is a legitimate thing or something. Whatever your vibe is, like you just have to talk to these strangers, have these conversations. Like it is the solution.

00:34:48 Casey: There’s people you know and people you don’t know. And all the money that you really want is probably in the pockets of people that you don’t know. And you got to go talk to them and you got to go have relationships with them. It’s not the accelerator. We have a bunch of ways to do that, but just to summarize it, just like go do it. I’m sure you can come up with some ways.  All right. So business owners will spend aggressively to make more money. If I spent a thousand dollars, they’re going to make me 10 grand. I’ll do it in my personal life. If I spent a thousand bucks, I’m not, it’s not like I’m going to make money, right?

00:35:15 Casey: It’s an expense. It’s not an investment. I treat it differently. I think that fractional CMOs show up with a weird relationship to money and they think of money as a personal expense versus a business expense, like a business investment. So they say in my life, it would feel weird for me to give someone $10,000 a month just to give me strategy and leadership. They feel that way. Which, okay, that might be true. Yeah, it would feel weird to me if like, my house cleaner said to me, Hey, I’m 10 grand a month just to tell you how I clean the house. What are you talking about? 

00:35:49 Casey: But in the business side, it’s a very different approach. And you have to let go of that personal belief system around like how I operate as a thrifty human. And you have to lean into, oh Oh, we’re at a really interesting time. Like I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but like AI is crazy disruptive and a lot of businesses are going to go out and we’re going to have a weird shift in the market and all these wars are happening. And it’s just a weird time.

00:36:14 Casey: I’ll tell you what, I’d rather make money today than wait three years. You know, I’d rather bring in the right team today to optimize for capital generation so I can create a war chest and just keep a bunch of cash. I have buying power, then  just like play it safe and you know, maybe I’ll make more money next year or something like that. It’s like, I want to really play hard right now. You want those entrepreneurs, they’re going to spend aggressively now because they know now’s the time.

00:36:44 Casey: If you’re in the real estate space, you know, every time the Fed drops the, interest rate, like  it spurs growth. Now’s the time for it. It’s not the time when the interest rate is going up. It’s when the interest rate is going down. Like that’s when you want to be with folks in the real estate space. Like it’s going to become a better real estate market. And there’s also a lot to be set around, the need for homes, like consumers needing homes  and home building and building materials and the world trade and all that kind of stuff. Right.

00:37:13 Casey: That’s interesting what’s going to happen there. But we want to keep our head in the game of what’s happening with our industry and how can we position ourselves to help our potential clients capitalize on these great things that are coming on the trends that we’re in. And the trend can be anything. The trend can be, it was really good. It’s going to get bad. So we got to go aggressive right now so we can get all the stuff that’s left. Let’s get all the crumbs we can while we still can.

00:37:41 Casey: Or it’s, guys, things are going to get really good really soon. We got to get in position to get as much of it as we can. It doesn’t matter. Like you can  tell a story that is inspiring depending on if the market’s going up or down, it doesn’t really matter. So business owners will spend. Like there’s no limit to what they’ll spend. Reasonably speaking, they just want  speed. They don’t want to save money. They want to go faster. Instead of it being half the price, they just want to get there in half the time or less.

00:38:10 Casey: They’ll spend more to get there faster.  Not everyone, but certainly the people that I want to work with will. So when you talk to a business owner, they’re likely problem unaware. This comes from Eugene Schwartz’s book,  Breakthrough Advertising, which is like a hundred years old or something, 90 years old. So they’re problem unaware. That might exist. Probably not. You don’t want to talk to people that don’t know they have a marketing problem. No way. And you got people that are aware, Hey, I know we have a marketing problem. Our marketing team just isn’t working. Right. We got an issue there.

00:38:39 Casey: That’s what they might be thinking, but they’re not clear on what a solution is. To them, the solution is like, I don’t know, maybe I fire some people. Maybe we just like replace some folks. Maybe we take Beth and we move her up to the leader and then we take John and we fire them. Like that’s what they’re thinking, right? So they’re like  unaware that there’s a solution of a marketing strategist and leader coming in called a CMOx, a fractional CMO. They’re unaware of that. At some point they become aware of a fractional CMO being a thing, but they’re unaware of you as a potential  fractional CMO.

00:39:07 Casey: And then finally, they know you, they’ve met you, they’ve seen you talk, they read your book, they watched a video of yours, they got an email from you, you called them, they were introduced to you, they saw you at a conference, they now know of you, and maybe they even know your rates. And then ultimately from there, they can choose to do business with you or not. But no one’s doing business with you if they don’t know they have a problem. No one’s doing business with you if they know they have a problem, but aren’t sure what a solution is.

00:39:33 Casey: You have a choice to create content that talks about  when a fractional CMO should come in, which is bridging the gap from you have a problem. This is a solution for you and  I am the best one of those. And here’s how we can work together.  You can run that content. So problem aware is where you’re going to start at a minimum, but solution  aware, the solution being a fractional CMO is a good place to start too.

00:40:02 Casey: If you know people that know about fractional CMOs, how do you differentiate this audience? It’s tough, right? But people that have hired fractional CFOs  kind of vis-a-vis know what a fractional CMO. So when you talk to people, you want to talk to them about their problems because they’re not buying a fractional CMO. They’re buying a solution. It’s like,  bought drill bits the other day. In my mind, I bought a hole in a project, right? The drill bit is the how, but the hole is the outcome. Like I want a clean hole through a piece of a PVC board. So I bought a drill bit for it. Less important the drill bit, more important than I got the hole that I wanted. 

00:40:43 Casey: So sell the outcome, identify the problem, sell the outcome. The conduit for that outcome is you. But again, to go back to the top, it has to be in  their language. It has to address their pains.  So the problem is the marketing team, the marketing department is not working. The pain is… And that means that we won’t actually be able to get the company up to this revenue mark, which to me is a big deal or to my board is a big deal or which means that we’ll finally be profitable or whatever. Like those are the things that in your message that you want to bring together. 

00:41:16 Casey: The worst thing for a prospect to do is to get on a call with you and you just to vomit to them. They need to just  share with you all of their problems and concerns. And then you get to help  show them that the problem that exists and the pain that’s associated with it. And then ultimately how to get that person to take action to get the outcome that they want, which is easy. Just hire me. There’s a level of professionalism here. Professionalism as in you got to be really good at your job. You got to be a really smart CMO. And that just means you need more time. You can do it fast if you’ve got the capacity. And if you don’t have the capacity, it doesn’t mean you give up. Right? It means you just keep going.

00:41:58 Casey: It might take you a year instead of a month, but you’re still doing it and you’re getting further along and getting closer to that outcome that you want. I just see so much opportunity as a fractional CMO today. I mean, our CMOs that are, we have a CMO, I was at a call with Raf on my team today and we were joking about one of our CMOs because it seems like every time she like trips or every time she falls asleep, a client throws her an extra 7,500 bucks or 10 K or something like that. Right?

00:42:28 Casey: These opportunities exist. Like she has the opportunity to do so much good for her clients and they see it and they just reward her  by adding in, you know, a different, like a project on top of fractional CMO work. So based fractional CMO work and then a project here, project there,  takes her, you know, a little bit of extra time. So she builds differently for it. It’s just like, it’s the opportunity is so big and bright for fractional CMOs.  And question that for a lot of industries right now in the marketing space. And when you see what’s happening with conversion API with Meta and like how easy it is to run ads.  Ad agencies are just kind of on the out. All this reliance on AI stuff, you know, there’s like tough industries to be in, but man, fractional CMO work.

00:43:10 Casey: I think it’s just getting started. It seems to me really, really early still. So I’ve got a lot more that I want to share about this later this month. Join me on a live webinar. We’re not upgrading Zoom. We’re going to keep it small.  Usually because then that gets people to show up a couple of minutes early and those people actually tend to want to watch the content and be engaged because we’re going to have, luckily, too many people than we have room for. We’re going to force that everyone’s on video so that you’re real and not an AI note taker or an actual just robot. So we can have a real conversation  and I’ll do a presentation. 

00:43:45 Casey: And then afterwards I open up the floor and I ask, answer any questions that you have.  Nothing held back. It’s fun. It’s fun to get to know you. It’s fun to kind of close that gap between me talking to you, maybe while you’re on a dog walk and actually getting to meet you. And I enjoy getting to meet you. So go to cmox.co/webinar and just schedule  the webinar on your calendar. You know, obviously sign up for it. You’ll opt in. We’ll send you a link. It’ll be on zoom. It’s a Zoom meeting, not a Zoom webinar so that we can actually have like, you can see everyone else that’s on it kind of stuff. Yeah. And then we’ll have a chat. Michael and my team will be there on the chat. He just grabs questions for me. And then when I’m ready for questions, he softballs them to me and then I’ll bring you on video and we’ll talk through your question. A lot of fun. I’d love to help you. So if that sounds like something that’s interesting to you, go to cmox.co/webinar  and um let’s go hang out for a little bit. All right. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

00:44:35 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today.  For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode,  you can share your question at FractionalCMOShow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button  so that I know that this content is helpful to you.  All right, go get them.