Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m gonna tell you about how to identify the right clients to go after as a fractional CMO with an interesting analogy around inside the car and outside the car. So if you’re wondering who to go after as a fractional CMO, stick around for this episode. 

00:00:15 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. 

00:01:12 Casey: Hey, it’s Casey, welcome back. All right, so let’s talk about going after a target or kind of building an audience to go after  as a fractional CMO. And I’ve said this before,  there’s really no magic in like, how do you find clients?  There’s just the people that you know and the people that you don’t know. And your job is to talk to all the people that you know and to start talking to people that you don’t know. So what I wanna talk about today is how you think about the people that you don’t know. Things happen, like I see this in the accelerator. People will come to me and they’ll say stuff like, okay, so what do you think about reaching out to this audience first or that audience first or what order should I do this in or whatever?

00:01:49 Casey: And inevitably, no matter what order they choose, the same thing happens, which is at some point they’ll run out of people that they know. So you’re going to have to approach strangers. And when we talk about approaching strangers, we need to be able to think like who would be a good fit. Said another way, if someone came up to you and they said, hey, I wanna give you like a perfect fit client, who’d be perfect for you? How do you describe them?  And I’m just gonna give you a couple issues that I see that people say. So one is people are way too specific. Kind of weird, right? Then I say you can be too specific, but you can be.

00:02:25 Casey: So what is too much specificity when it comes to uh like niching down? And the answer is like, if you said that you wanna only work with women owned businesses  or even more specific, Black women owned businesses in the state of Florida, that’s so hard to get that audience. It’s not impossible, but it’s really difficult to find that audience. And it’s just so specialized, but also not specialized.

00:02:55 Casey: So the problem with that thought of like black women owned business in Florida is like from the outside, you’re like, well, I wanna work with black owned businesses and I wanna work with women entrepreneurs, both of which are great. And I wanna work with people that are in my state, Florida, let’s say. The problem is that their problems aren’t the same because just inherently there’s the people that are selling to businesses and selling to consumers. The people that are doing e-commerce and people that are selling to the government. 

00:03:22 Casey: There’s the people that are brand new and never made a dollar online and the 

people doing $100 million a year. So nothing in saying Black women owned businesses in Florida is actually useful, but it feels useful. And that’s a pretty obvious kind of one from the outside, but that same idea repeats itself. So if we say, I wanna work with SaaS businesses, well, it’s like what kind of SaaS business? And moreover, like uh Sam Altman recently said in  August, he said that we’re moving into the fast fashion of SaaS which is like everyone’s creating SaaS.

00:03:57 Casey: I mean, if you aren’t creating your own SaaS right now, you’re not really paying attention to what’s available. We can all create our own SaaS. We can all build our own software as a solution. You can just go over to lovable.dev and you could just say like, build me a CRM to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it will build something pretty. And then you take that design over maybe to Claude to get it coded up  or maybe cursor or something else. you know, maybe that’s like outside of your wheelhouse to get it coded, but anyone can create SaaS right now, anyone. Doesn’t mean it’s any good, just anyone can create it. So why do I bring this up?

00:04:34 Casey: Saying that you wanna work with SaaS companies is just way too broad. It is like saying, I only wanna work with women or I only wanna work with men. It’s a huge audience, SaaS is enormous. SaaS is getting bigger and bigger. So that’s not a good fit for you. So  how do you start niching down in a way that is actually useful and what is not useful. So I think of this as an inside the car, outside the car model. All right, so when you go car shopping, there’s a type of car that you’re looking for. The first thing is what? The style of the car. And I’m not a car guy, okay? But you have sedans, have trucks, you have sports cars, coupes, right? You have these basic types of cars.

00:05:20 Casey: You have extra large SUVs like the Suburban and that unbelievably huge, cheap, Wagoneer, my goodness. I can have like a dozen kids in that car. So as you think about working,  like prospecting and talking to strangers, think about outside the car. What does the outside of the car look like? The car being their business. How would you describe it? What are the big things that make it unique? Probably revenue, probably industry,  probably who they sell to, ticket price.

00:05:50 Casey: You know, is it small ticket? Is it $5 products, $10 products? Is it $100, $500, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, millions of dollars? Like what is the ticket level of the thing that they sell? Is it a service? Is it a product? Is it a transactional sale? Is it a consultative sale? Is it a long-term sales cycle that takes years or does it take moments? Because someone who sells on TikTok shops is looking for a sale quickly and they’re probably not selling for a lot of money.

00:06:18 Casey: 15, 20, 30, 50 bucks, right? It’s a pretty average transaction size on a high volume website like a TikTok shop for e-commerce. But conversely, if you’re working with sales departments and you’ve got full-time people and they’re flying to visit their customers and they’re working to sell big stuff, then those could be multimillion dollar deals. So the outside of the car is really important. What does it look like? What is this thing?

00:06:45 Casey: And all of these are fine answers. You can tell me any permutation of what I just said. You could say short sales cycle, low cost, high volume, e-commerce, great. Or on the opposite side, it’s low volume,  extra high cost, extra long sales cycle, very consultative sale. Both are fine. Anything in between is fine. One is not inherently better than the other. I would say in some ways, the  slower business of the longer sales cycle, is a little bit more gentle for the CMO, which is nice if that’s kind of what you’re looking for. But also,  the energy of the fast moving, high volume, zero to hero, overnight, e-commerce play is super fun too. And some marketers that went from the shithouse to the penthouse pretty quickly doing e-commerce stuff. It’s a great model. Just what model do you want to be in?

00:07:40 Casey: If you ask me, I tend to lean more to the consultative sale, high ticket stuff. I just think it’s more fun. But that doesn’t mean that e-commerce isn’t fun.  E-commerce does come with its costs. E-commerce sales tend to happen during holidays. Are you comfortable working during holidays? Stuff like that to take into consideration. But really, what is the outside of the car? What does the outside look like?

00:08:03 Casey: And I think like revenue, industry, who they sell to, that kind of stuff is what you need to be looking at. Inside of the car, think about inside of the car. You’re not getting inside of the wrong car. If you’re looking for an SUV and a cool little sports car shows up, it’s like, it kind of doesn’t matter that the steering wheel is wrapped in some fancy Italian leather because you’re never gonna drive it, right? So you want to first identify the outside stuff and then the inside stuff is the stuff that’s like, almost like the psychographic. It’s interesting. It’s,  it’s like, what’s the gender of the business owner? What’s the race of the business owner? What’s the commitment that they have for like, you know, like Tom shoes, like a social enterprise.

00:08:51 Casey: Are you interested in that kind of stuff?  Those are cool things, too. But to me, that’s always like we would say in New Orleans, that’s a land yap. That’s a bonus. That’s a gift that you get when you talk to enough people in the industry that meet the outside so that when you get in conversation with one, you’re like, boom, that’s the one, that person’s special for a certain reason. And then you go work with that person if you want, you put your services and if they vibe with you and you vibe with them, then you’re off to the races. That’s the idea, like you got to first  identify what the outside looks like before you identify with the inside.

00:09:23 Casey: It’s like getting lost, if you’re gonna buy a house, getting lost on what the wallpaper in the bathroom looks like when you first got out kind of consider what the neighborhood is and if the house is built on a solid foundation. So don’t get too lost  in the miners  and lose,  right? That’s like majoring in the miners, that whole idea. You don’t want to focus on the miners, focus on the major stuff that you can see first and then it’s all about reps. And also maybe working with some clients at the beginning that aren’t your favorite, but it gets you in the door and it gets you a yes and it gets you cash flowing.

00:10:00 Casey: You work with them for six months a year. Cool, great. Now you know the industry and now you can move laterally or vertically, right? You’re moving up with better clients, with more of the type of people that you’re looking for. I remember years ago, I went to a marketing conference  and uh I was there with a marketer who worked for a very big marketer. If I said their name, most of you would probably know who it was, who that big marketer was. And this guy was just not my people. And his boss was just not my people.

00:10:29 Casey: I just remember going to this event and like we’re in the green room getting ready and this guy pulls out like a Ziploc bag of pills. And he’s like, what kind of pill do you want? And I was like, what? Is this Tylenol? He’s like, no, man, I got Xanax, I got this, I got that. I was like, get out of here. This wasn’t my vibe, right? That was off putting to me. Yet I needed to work in that industry long enough to kind of cycle through enough of those kinds of crummy folks in order to find the people that I want to work with that I was like energetically aligned with.

00:11:01 Casey: And now I’m attracting those people and working with them and having a lot of fun. But I didn’t earn that out the gate. I kind of had to go through and get my stripes and be the kind of person that someone of the caliber I wanted to work with wanted to work with. So consider that. It’s more important to get the outside of the car right. And then you can kind of replace the interior stuff, right? You can go find the client who’s like  a little bit different, maybe

it’s a hack maybe, maybe this is a hack, you your mileage may vary.  But like religious folks, that can be a hack. If you’re not religious, that’s cool. If you’re religious, that’s cool. But like religious folks, they can be pretty cool people, right? Like the real ones, like the real ones who really believe it and are really kind of like  giving.

00:11:45 Casey: And I’ve worked with some folks that are really religious that I didn’t have the same beliefs of. And they were just wonderful people. And I just told my buddy about that and he was like, dude, that’s a hack for you. Find the people like that. It’s like, oh, that’s really good. They’re good, they’re honest, they pay on time, they say please and thank you. They’re grateful for your work. So you can replace the clients that you have until you find those clients. And as you get started, it’s more important for you to work in the industry. And maybe you wanna only work with the perfect people. And that level of perfection is really dangerous in business because you’re going to get hurt.

00:12:20 Casey: You’re going to find yourself in long patches where you can’t find the perfect person. And I don’t know if that’s because the perfect person isn’t, you’re not talking to them or if you’re just perceiving everyone that you’re seeing incorrectly. So I really don’t think that, I don’t think that you should work with, generally speaking, like nonprofit type companies, by and large, love a nonprofit, but I don’t think you should have them as clients, by and large. I think for profits are where you should have clients. But here’s the caveat: donate your time freely or donate your money freely to the nonprofits that you love.

00:12:56 Casey: That’s the hack when it comes to doing like this feel good work. I would rather work with a company that does no evil, that is morally neutral and then  do something else with my time because they pay a high rate to me. Go donate my time to another company that I really love, that I believe in, that I wanna help. It’s awesome. I’m working on a project right now with a guy.  Just think he’s a really cool dude. So I’m just like volunteering some time to help him. And he could never afford me. And he kind of feels bad, right? And in the conversation, I’m like, listen, dude, I will never ask you for money. That is not the relationship I want to have with you. Instead, I want you to teach me your expertise. Like that’s how we’re going to swap this out.

00:13:35 Casey: And he was like, amazing, you got it. Like anything I can do. So I would never be able to charge that guy money, but I can go charge other people money and develop really good stuff for morally neutral or morally positive companies and do no harm or do good actively and then I can go give my time freely to do more good. So when you’re looking at these clients,  people will say stuff to me like, oh, I was in that industry, but everyone was a jerk. It’s like, oh, were they a jerk or did you not have a backbone? Did you not have a spine? Did you not have the strength that they needed to see in you? And they were just kind of testing you, just like my kids test me every day. Like is 7:30 really my bedtime or is it eight o’clock or 8:30 or nine or 9:30 tonight? Right, they’re testing me and seeing where the actual boundary gets held.

00:14:20 Casey: And when I’m porous, then my kids can kind of push me around a little bit. And when I have a real solidified boundary, they respect it as well.  My daughter might fight a little bit, but generally speaking, right. So when we look back at clients that we’ve worked with or we’re thinking about the clients that we’re talking to and like something feels a little off. I tend to still just lean in and do the work and like maybe I haven’t out after 30 days and say, I was wrong. That guy’s an asshole or that woman was terrible and I hated working with her or something.

00:14:48 Casey: That’s fine but I’d rather get in and get the experience and get paid than I would to just like complain and wait for perfection and like overly scrutinize my niche down to like, I only want to work with guys, know, business owners that are actively in therapy that are doing at least $5 million a year in their business who are XYZ. I just don’t think it’s worth doing that. I think you pick the big stuff, the outside stuff, and then you just test drive these clients. You test drive them for 30 days or 90 days.

00:15:17 Casey: You get paid, you learn a lot, it builds your story, builds your credibility, builds your insights. And then you can go turn around and either renew with the client if you’re happy working with them  or just leave and go find another client. But you’re now better because you have a bigger track record. So that’s where I would go  if I was in your position kind of thinking on niching. It’s just like these are the things to look out for. And obviously, I love this stuff.  And if you want my help and my team’s help, I’m so thrilled  to offer it to you. You can come into the accelerator.

00:15:47 Casey: And we meet just about every other day. We have a live call uh for the boardroom members, doing over $10,000 a month in recurring business.  They’re on Slack, excuse me, on WhatsApp with me every day. We’re just jamming and chatting. I don’t know, 15 messages. Another one just came in  on WhatsApp right now with the boardroom crew. So I’m staying in touch with folks. I’m helping guide them, helping make sure their head’s in the right place, saving them time, saving them money, helping them negotiate upside with their clients.

00:16:14 Casey: It’s great. It’s a lot of fun. So if you want my help, just come book a call, CMOx.com/call, book on a call and we’ll see if you’ve got what it takes to be one of our next success stories. All right. See you later. Bye.  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.