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I was scrolling Twitter a few months back and spotted this tweet from Timothy Armoo, the former CEO of Influencer Agency FanBytes. In his tweet, he shared valuable lessons he had learned during his journey of selling his business for an eight-figure sum.

I immediately recognised parallels between his experiences and my own with Learning Heroes. So I asked if he’d be willing to share (and expand on) the story for our VAMO audience. I was pleased when he agreed, and I enjoyed recording this conversation for you. There are some great insights and takeaways. Enjoy! 

Follow Timothy for more on LinkedIn and Twitter (he’s a great follow if you’re into this stuff)

Question 1: Why did you decide to start your own business?

I started really because I wanted to be rich and I realised that a business was probably the fastest way to get there. At 17, I was tinkering around on the internet and I started my first real company called Entrepreneur Express, and that was where I found out the value of social communities and social pages.

Within 11 months, that company got bought by an American company, and I realised, “Oh my God, this thing can fundamentally change my life”. For the next three to four years I tried a bunch of ideas, pretty much all of them failed, and then I discovered FanBytes. As a consequence of the right market timing and right skills, we grew the company from zero to 75 people and sold it in May of 2022. 

Question 2: How did you get started?

In the beginning, we focused on a particular niche, specifically music labels, and then we scaled by doing a lot of speaking engagements, and content marketing. By just focusing aggressively on just that one niche, we became known as the best people in that particular niche, rigorously marketed into that set segment of people, and then eventually became so popular there, we could then go to other industries.

I found this really interesting. I’m a big fan of owning a small niche first and working your way up the leagues. "Riches are in niches," a famous quote by Pat Flynn, emphasises the importance of identifying a specific market or audience to excel in business. Go too broad early on and it can be challenging to compete. For example, surpassing established figures like Steve Bartlett or Joe Rogan in the podcast space is unrealistic for newcomers.

However, by focusing on a specific niche, you can establish yourself as the go-to source of information in that area. For instance, hosting a super niche podcast on Agile Training may not achieve viral numbers, but it enables you to create the best Agile podcast worldwide and become a recognised thought leader in that niche.

By conquering battles in your niche, you gradually pave the way for broader opportunities and overall business success.

Question 3: What obstacles did you overcome?

The biggest obstacle that I faced was probably getting out of my own way. What you need at the beginning is to have that sense of self-belief that you can actually do it. It's so easy to read a lot of books and documentaries and think that the people who've achieved what you're trying to achieve are better than you. And starting at 21, I had this sense that I was not as great as the people I read about. 

So, actually getting out of my own way and understanding that they are human beings just like me. And they have a way of thinking about the world, which I just need to adopt. And so once I got out of my own way, I was able to think bigger. I was able to act bigger. I was able to just be bigger, which meant that anytime I had a problem, I just intuitively thought about a bigger solution because someone else had actually solved that problem for me. 

Question 4: Did you ever feel like quitting?

I never felt like quitting. In fact, I was chatting to my co-founder and commented “Isn't it funny that we never thought there was no other outcome than to sell the company?”

At no point did we think about failing because we just had this view of the world that there was only gonna be one outcome to this business, which was for it to be acquired. My age also helped me quite a lot. The fact that I was 20-something, I started in university. I didn't have any dependents or anything like that. Therefore, I just had this attitude to risk, which was very Laissez-faire. 

If I did quit, what else would I do? What I would do is still run a business. So if I'm doing the thing, which I would've done if I quit anyway, I might as well just keep going on.

Ian and I resonate with this mindset. When we embarked on the journey of starting Learning Heroes, we were unwavering in our belief that there would be only one outcome. Doubt never crept in.

However, we've come to realise that this level of unwavering certainty hasn't always been present in other projects we've been involved in. And from those experiences, we've learned a valuable lesson. If you don't feel 100% confident about accomplishing the specific end goal you've set for yourself, it may be worth reevaluating your chosen direction.

If doubt begins to overshadow your confidence, it might be an indication that some adjustments or reassessments are needed.

Question 5: Can you sell? If so, what is your sales style?

From where I grew up, I didn't know anyone who had built a business, so everything I had to learn was through books. So I’d just go on Amazon and get the top 10 books on sales and read them. 

I have this fundamental belief that rather than trying to sell, the aim is to get people to buy.

How can you get someone to not only recognise they have a problem but then also convince themselves that your product and your solution is the right thing for their problem? 

Nobody ever pops out of the mother's womb and goes, “I now know how to sell.” It's a trait and it's a feature that you can consistently hone, but I think it's all a mental thing like you tell yourself that you are not a salesperson, so therefore you don't actually go out to sell. You have to build an identity around just being someone who can learn and upscale rather than I'm this type of person.

When someone says they hate sales, usually what they really mean is they don’t want to be salesy. But you don’t have to be salesy to sell. If selling makes you feel sleazy, you’re doing it wrong. 

Your goal isn’t to persuade or trick someone to buy. It’s to help them make a decision.

I’ve closed millions using a simple technique built around asking questions. 

You have to forget selling for a moment and leave behind all the negative connotations associated with that word.   

Instead, you’re going to have a conversation that helps you to understand the prospect's problems and see if you can help them. 

When you get the prospect to talk, closing becomes easier. There are different ways to close, and different books and gurus share their own systems. But I shared my system here: My 6-Step Closing Technique 

Question 6: What pisses you off about the business/entrepreneurial world?

There are a lot of things that piss me off about the business and entrepreneur world. I'll name a few. The first one is the need for people to always rush into getting investment. They do that before they’ve made sure the product or service is something that people actually want. People wanna skip that section because they believe that fundraising is the achievement. I blame the press for that. You know, they celebrate a lot of things around fundraising.

The second thing is people who have a very unrealistic view as to what their business success actually looks like. I spoke to someone who runs a doughnut company, and the previous year made around 20k, and the following year they made 40k.

I asked him “So, what's your (exit) number?” And he said, a hundred million. It took all my strength to not slap him around the face and just go, “Come on man. Your business is in no way going to make a hundred million even if you did this for the rest of your life.” 

So, having unrealistic expectations. For us, I was very clear to investors, to my team, to my co-founder. I said, look, the odds are this company is not going to be a billion-dollar company. This company's also not going to be a hundred million, but I can comfortably say this company's going to be sold for tens of millions.

And it's exactly what happened because I understood the way these businesses were valued. I understood it was a tech-enabled agency, and understood that people were at the core. And when we sold the company, we had 75 people. But to get to say hundreds of millions, We'd have had to be doing it for another 10 to 15 years.

So, those two things are the things that really piss me off. Unrealistic expectations and standards, and there's a constant desire for investment and fundraising when really what you need to do is figure out, is this something people want? Do the hard yards of actually seeing, is this something customers want?

Build something that can actually scale before you go and get investment. 

Question 7: What part of the business growth did you enjoy the most?

When we were going through the business sale I actually created a lot of voice notes on my phone (every single day). I would give my thoughts on how I was feeling etc. About two weeks out, I remember saying to myself, “Oh my God, I can retire. I'm completely done”. I was thinking about all the fancy places I'd go to and all that stuff. And I did that for two months. For two months I intentionally tried doing nothing, and the truth is doing nothing is actually incredibly hard. It ends up being quite boring. It ends up being quite repetitive.

More importantly, as entrepreneurs, we think that the end goal is to work really hard so you can just chill and relax. But I actually think that especially when you go through a company acquisition, what it gives you is a freedom of choice to be able to choose to do things that you actively want to do, rather than doing things that you have to do.

Question 8: What was the biggest lesson you took away front the experience?

The biggest lesson I took from selling my company was actually not to be too greedy. A lot of founders start their companies and they want to absolutely rinse everything out of the market opportunity. And then when they're tired or frustrated, that's when they sell. Actually, what you want to do is focus on where there's room for growth.

So rather than trying to rinse out 100%, get to the point where you've got to 70% of the story, 70% of the opportunity complete. Because when a buyer is coming, they're buying future growth. 

Don't get too greedy because a lot of people want to max out everything in their business. And then when you then choose to wanna sell it, or someone is approaching you and they ask you, well, “what are the growth levers we're going to pull to be able to get 3, 4, 5 times back our money?” You say, “Whoa, we've done everything. We've expanded everywhere. We've served all customers”. Then there's nothing for them to buy.

This is a great reminder that businesses are more appealing to buyers when they demonstrate the potential for further growth. You might think, "I won't sell yet because if I secure some significant deals, I can sell for a higher multiple."

However, that's not always the case. Buyers are not interested in acquiring a business when there's no one left to sell to. Holding onto your business for too long can be counterproductive.

Prospective buyers are looking for businesses with untapped markets and growth opportunities. 

Just like a bird isn't afraid of the branch snapping, don't become too attached to your business, thinking it's the one and only opportunity.

Key Takeaways

• Owning a small niche first and working your way up can lead to business success. Focusing on a specific market or audience allows you to establish yourself as the go-to source of information in that area, gradually paving the way for broader opportunities.

• Overcoming self-doubt is crucial. Recognise that successful individuals are human beings who have faced similar challenges. Adopt their way of thinking and believe in your own capabilities to think bigger and find solutions.

• Having unwavering certainty and a clear outcome in mind can drive your entrepreneurial journey. Doubt should be a signal to reevaluate your direction if you're not feeling 100% confident about achieving your specific goals.

• Selling is not about being salesy or persuasive. Instead, focus on helping potential customers make informed decisions that address their problems. Engage in conversations that allow you to understand their needs and provide relevant solutions.

• Unrealistic expectations and a rush for investment can hinder business success. Prioritise ensuring your product or service meets customer demand and build a scalable foundation before seeking external funding.

• Selling a business requires avoiding excessive greed. Instead of maximising every opportunity, focus on demonstrating potential growth to appeal to buyers. Keep room for future expansion and avoid exhausting all possibilities before considering a sale.

I hope you found the conversation useful and apply some of the learning to your own journey. 

Thanks again to Timothy for being generous with his time, I hope we can catch up again after his next big exit. 

That’s all for this week.

I’ll be back next week with more tips and strategies to help you sell more and market better. 

Thanks,

Mike 

Subscribe now

To keep this work sustainable and the content useful, I need to take the occasional break. So, there’s no free newsletter this week. 

The newsletter has crossed 10k subscribers and became a best seller on Substack with a top 10 ranking globally. But the most rewarding stat so far is that the subscriber Slack community continues to grow. I never imagined reaching this scale, and none of this would be possible without you. Thank you for reading, participating, and for subscribing. There’s so much more to come. 

However, after going strong for more than 90 weeks without a break, I've decided to give the team a well-deserved rest this week. And guess what? I encourage you all to do the same! Take some time for yourself, recharge, and enjoy some well-deserved downtime. We all need it from time to time.

Don't worry, though, we'll be back next week. But, if you’re hankering for something to read over the weekend, or you’ve recently joined the community, check out this collection of our best stuff or my most viewed posts 👇

Grow Your Following 

1. The marketing strategy that needs no budget

2. The stand alone strategy 

3. Permissionless co-marketing - How we hijacked Gymshark's audience

4. You're not too old for TikTok 

5. Personal brand Q&A

6. The podcast blueprint 

7. How to grow your Twitter following 

Sell More 

1. Feed your funnel and win new business for free

2. The 6 step sales closing technique

3. Prospect stopped responding? Send the ‘close the file’ email

4. Why you should be selling yachts, not dinghies

5. Do this to make more sales

6. Improve your cold sales messaging

7. How to keep your pipeline full

Market Better 

1. Cheap marketing strategies to get your business noticed

2. The content marketing blueprint

3. A simple method to launch a new service so it doesn’t flop

4. The anti-marketing approach to marketing that works

5. The no-brainer marketing strategy

6. Market your business better

7. Tips to start your content strategy from an agency owner

See you next week!

Most economists predict that a recession is on the horizon for 2023.

And while no one can accurately predict how bad it will be, it’s a good idea to start planning for tough times 

That’s why I’m encouraging business owners to scrutinise their sales and marketing teams.  

Have they got the grit, skills, and confidence to support you? 

Or, to quote Dan's Grandad, are they soft as lard?  

This topic was prompted by a recent conversation I had with a business owner and his marketing team. 

The owner came to me concerned they weren’t selling enough. 

Yet, when I pointed out what they were doing wrong, the marketing manager told me that she has a marketing degree. 

F*cking brilliant. 

I’m sure everyone was very proud of you for getting a 2.1 with your dissertation on ‘the impact of cultural differences on international marketing strategies’ but your boss is here telling you he’s not got enough sales to take a wage. 

If you are in for a bit of a scrap, it’s worth reviewing who is in your corner. 

I wouldn’t take fitness advice from a fat personal trainer, and I wouldn’t share advice if it didn’t work for me in the real world. 

In this edition I spoke with Benjamin Dennehy, The UK’s Most Hated Sales Trainer, for advice on how to weather a downturn in sales, and I share my own daily sales activity so you can see how your team measures up.  

I hope you find it useful 👇

What should people do if they’re struggling to sell during an economic downturn? 

Unless you’re selling a product or service that nobody actually wants, the way you’re behaving is causing you not to sell. 

This is a common problem with salespeople. They like to blame external factors. 

“It’s the economy, it’s the war in Ukraine, it’s Brexit, it’s the cost of living crisis” 

Yet despite all the shit going on in the world, trillions upon trillions of dollars are still changing hands

It’s got bugger all to do with those external factors, and everything to do with the crap going on in your head. 

If you're struggling to sell in a tough climate, you need to look in the mirror. 

Because do you know what’s really happening? During the good times, you weren’t selling Jack. 

You were just taking orders!!!. 

If you enjoy Benjamin’s direct style, you might want to check out his free video content on his new YouTube channel created by the IAM Studio Team: The UK's Most Hated Sales Trainer

Comforting words of wisdom from Benjamin.

But let's be frank. You subscribe to this newsletter because we provide honest, no-bullshit advice. 

And whilst I might not agree with everything Benjamin said (events like Brexit have undoubtedly made it more difficult for some businesses), I do think some teams have gone soft. 

Now is the time to scrutinize your sales and marketing strategy and ensure that you (or your business) are not simply order-takers. 

“Can I take your order please?” 

When you go into McDonald's, if you were to tap someone on the shoulder and ask them, “what are you doing?” the odds of them saying “oh, I’m just browsing” is pretty slim. They're in there to place an order. 

If your sales team is made up of order takers this is bad. Because order-taking is very dependent on circumstances outside of your control. 

During a recession, consumers tend to be more selective in their spending, and businesses that are merely fulfilling orders are likely to see their sales decline.

When the tide is high, order-takers do well. But with the tide going out, is your business going to get caught with its pants down? 

Sales Bootcamp - How to check if you’re ready for a scrap

In general, boxers know that success in their sport requires not just physical talent, but also mental toughness, discipline, and a willingness to push themselves to their limits in training.

Is everyone (including yourself) disciplined and willing to push themselves in your business?

We all know my Learning Heroes story. 

The strategies I used then continue to generate new business now. 

They’re not fancy or complicated. But I thought I’d share them with you, so you can see how you or your team measure up. 

#1 Daily Prospecting

I actively seek out potential customers who fit my target market.

This typically includes reaching out to 10 leads with a personalised message. 

Leaving 10 comments using the waffle house strategy.

And making at least 10 new connections on socials. 

#2 Qualifying 

Just like in boot camp, where not everyone can handle the intensity of the training, not all prospects are a good fit for your business. 

To avoid wasting your time and energy on 'tyre kickers', it's important to disqualify prospects who are unlikely to convert. 

In sales, disqualifying prospects is just as important as qualifying them, and it takes discipline and determination to do it effectively.

So I typically remove 25-50 connections on socials every day. 

And push my prospects hard with upfront information about costs and processes before agreeing to a call. 

#3 Ask for the Sale 

If I’m not speaking to 5-10 qualified leads a day I get annoyed. I know my product can help them, so I’m not worried about being a pushy salesperson. 

To ask for the sale you need to get prospects on a call. 

I’m clear about the outcome of the call and will say things like

 “By the end of the chat, we’ll decide if we’re going to move forward or not, does that sound reasonable?” 

Also, I only send personalised proposals to prospects I’m confident will close. Don’t waste time documenting your stupidity by sending proposals to clients who are never going to buy. 

If you can be disciplined about the number of calls you book in, and execute them with skill, the money will follow. 

#4 Follow Up 

We all know the stat that it takes 5-7 follow-ups to close a deal. But you’ve got to develop a sales brain. There’s no magic formula or amount of time you should wait before following up. 

Every case is different. But your sales team should be performing these disciplined CRM tasks every day:

Review the leads in your CRM - where are they up to? Do you need to follow up? 

Send the close-the-file email to any leads that have gone AWOL. 

And brutally remove dead leads from your CRM.

And that’s it. Told you it was simple. 

But if you or your sales team are performing those activities daily, you’ll have a great chance of making more sales for your business. 

Just like the gym, you can’t skip a day and expect the same results. Show up and get it done. 

Tough times require grit and discipline. Now is the time to remove anyone who you don’t want in your corner.  

And don’t forget to review your marketing activity. 

If the content being shared isn’t resulting in new sales opportunities, what is the point? 

Huge brands can put out content not linked to sales, but you’re not a huge brand. 

Your marketing content should complement sales activity.  

And I don’t need a marketing degree to know that.

Key Takeaways 

There’s a difference between ‘order takers’ and ‘order getters’. Which are you?

If sales are slowing in your business, you might find that your sales and marketing activities need urgent review. Set a daily sales boot camp based on my own activities. 

Is your team hard or lard? Tough times require grit and discipline. Now is the time to remove anyone who you don’t want in your corner. Be brutal. 

Review marketing activity - if the content being shared isn’t resulting in new sales opportunities, what is the point? Huge brands can put out content not linked to sales, but you’re not a huge brand. Your marketing activity should be sales focused, to help your sales team complete its daily prospecting activities. 

VAMO Member Shout 

Someone who is definitely not an order taker is Mark Simpson from Boostly. 

Inspired by our cheap marketing strategies to get your business noticed resource, he headed to Nashville with an OOH marketing campaign of his own. 

Brilliantly executed and resulted in 82 sales calls. Good look closing that new business, Mark. 

We hope it inspires you and your team to push yourself that little bit harder.

That’s all for this week. 

We hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community

You’ll get all of this:

⚡ 1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/growing your following with a coaching video.

⚡ Access to the private Slack community

⚡ Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡ Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike and Dan

⚡ Community meetups

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

Time is not on your side, especially if you’re a bootstrapped Founder or a small business. 

How do you avoid certain death? Where should you put your time when you’re just starting out so you don’t run out of runway? 

Facebook ads? Email? Press?

I own a Creative Agency. So does Dan. We both like money and wish we had more. So, you might (fairly) assume we’d suggest a content marketing solution at this point. 

But that’s not actually how we found our first customers for our own start-ups.

We secured our first customer with targeted outreach, a bottle of Baileys, and reckless regard for the UK's Bribery Act. 

It’s a story we discuss in this month's content marketing podcast special. 

In the episode, we discuss the right time to start using content marketing, and offer strategies to help you avoid common mistakes.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube here 👇

“Mike, you’ve just told me my business is going to die, I don’t have time to watch that. Give me the good stuff now”.

Ok. But watch it later 👀

Lesson #1 - you can learn more from the things successful companies do, than what they’re trying to sell you. 

With that in mind, I want to share some research that I think you’ll find useful 👇

Lenny’s Kickstarting Menu

How did the world's most successful companies land their first customers? 

Lenny Rachitsky (ex-Airbnb) surveyed the Founders of over 100 top companies and it turned out there are only really seven reliable ways to find your first 100 users:  

1. Reach out to friends and colleagues

2. Reach out to targeted strangers

3. Go where your target audience hangs out (online or offline)

4. Enlist influencers (paid or organically)

5. Get press

6. Create viral content

7. Get physical placement (e.g. flyers, stickers, signs)

He calls it his ‘kickstarting menu’

The strategies accounted for 99% of all early growth, and he broke it down further by business type.

The typical path to the first 1,000 users for consumer startups:

1. Reach out to friends and colleagues (e.g. email them, post on social media, call them)

2. Go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline (e.g. forums, Product Hunt, college campuses, Craigslist, etc.)

3. Enlist influencers

If you’re a marketplace or platform (e.g. DoorDash, Cameo, Substack):

1. Reach out to targeted strangers (e.g. DM celebs, email owners)

2. Get physical placement (e.g. stickers, flyers)

3. Enable your supply to drive your demand

If you have a remarkable story to tell (e.g. Airbnb, Spotify, Superhuman):

1. Get press

2. Try to create viral content

Your job is to pick an item and try it. Does it work for you and your business? If it works, order more. If it doesn’t, try something new off the menu. 

The majority of successful businesses found their early growth in just one or two channels. So, don’t be greedy and order everything on the menu. 

Full blog here:

Lenny's Newsletter

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 4: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of my newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work. Subscribe to get each and every issue…

Read more

4 years ago · 98 likes · 5 comments · Lenny Rachitsky

There are some fantastic examples for each strategy. It’s well worth a read. 

Two and three (reach out to targeted strangers & go where your target audience hangs out) were my go-to channels at the start of Learning Heroes. 

What are yours? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the private slack group (for paid members). Are you having success with any of the seven? Did you do something different? Are you tempted to try something else on the menu? Let me know. 

Subscribe now

The Wrap-Up 🌯 

In case you missed it, here’s what the VAMO slack community has been up to throughout February.

Your Questions Answered: Timothy Armoo

In last month's edition of ‘Your Questions Answered’ we spoke to Timothy Armoo, who built and sold two successful businesses. 

Every month our VAMO paid members get to ask our guests questions specifically about their business. 

Just like Holger did 👇

What would you tell your younger self, not to do?  - Holger Bösch

Do not poo-poo the idea of company culture. 

I know. It sounds very fuzzy-wuzzy. 

When I was starting the game, and I’d listen to people say the secret to their success was ‘great people’, I’d be like “come on man, that’s some bullshit, tell me the thing you actually did that got you the customers, right?”.

But, it is true. A company is just a group of people that come together to solve a specific goal. So, your people are a big competitive advantage. 

Because of my own immaturity, at the beginning, I believed we could easily swap around people. “Oh, you’ve left, bring in someone new”. 

That was a bad mentality to have. 

In my next company, I will spend a lot of time thinking about the type of people we want and how the company culture can attract and keep them.

Read the rest of the article here.

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Your Questions Answered: Timothy Armoo

Watch now (9 min) | 👋 Hello and welcome to this month's edition of community questions. This subscriber-only email is where we answer your questions submitted in our member-only Slack community…

Read more

3 years ago · 6 likes

Next Guest Annoucement ⚠️

Our next guest in the hot seat is Steve Bartlett.  Investor, host of the DOAC podcast, a Dragon on BBC's Dragon's Den, and is (annoyingly) pretty decent at football, too.

Believe it or not, he's also a fan of VAMO (yes, really) - so we're off to London to put your questions to him.

If you want to ask him a question about your business, join our paid community and gain access to our private slack here.

Subscribe now

Unlock The Power Of Reactive Marketing 

When it’s pissing down outside, “cabin fever” can set in and you start to daydream about somewhere hot. The result? An increase in online searches for flights and holidays. 

Reactive marketing involves responding quickly to events, trends or customer behaviours in real time. 

Carrie Rose has built a business around this idea. In this VAMO edition, she shared how she does it, and how it can be used in small businesses and start-ups. You can watch/read it below.

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Unlock the Power of Reactive Marketing ⚡️

Watch now (7 min) | When it’s pissing down outside, “cabin fever” can set in and you start to daydream about somewhere hot. The result? An increase in online searches for flights and holidays. Reactive marketing involves responding quickly to events, trends or customer behaviours in real time…

Read more

3 years ago · 3 likes · Mike Winnet

VAMO Member Shoutout 🚀

We love it when people try the strategies we suggest. And because we only suggest stuff that we do ourselves, we know they work. 

As Christine Smethurst discovered using the Waffle House Method to land a big new client.

Success in any area comes from doing the basics, every day. So, we’re really pleased to see Christine showing up daily and getting the results. 

Don’t forget to share your wins in the community slack channel so we can celebrate with you.

That’s all for this week. 

We hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community

You’ll get all of this: 

⚡ 1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/growing your following with a coaching video.

⚡ Access to the private Slack community

⚡ Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡ Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike and Dan

⚡ Community meetups

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

It goes against everything they’ve been taught in business. 

But trust me, the give-to-get approach works. 

Gone are the days when simply sharing a post with a link would suffice. Content marketing has changed. 

In this edition, I share how you can stay top-of-mind with a straightforward content strategy that anyone can use. 

You’ll learn how to boost your followers and sales with budget-friendly content marketing. 

It’s a 2-minute watch and a 5-minute read. 

The Story.

When I started my YouTube channel, I already had around 60k followers on LinkedIn. 

I figured a good percentage of that audience would migrate over when I asked them. 

“I’ve got a new YouTube channel - click the link and smash that subscribe button”

But they didn’t. 

I’d made a common mistake, one I see lots of businesses still making on their socials. 

“If you build it, they will come” 

Well, no, actually. 

The Science.

“It’s harder than ever to get audiences to click that call-to-action” - Amanda Natividad

And that’s for two main reasons: 

1. People are lazy - we don’t want to click on links that take us away from our current platform.

2. Algorithms reward platform-native content - they don’t promote content that pushes users away from their own platform. 

This is the best write-up I’ve read on the topic - zero-click content 

In it, Amanda explains that Google is continually updating the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) so that users don’t even need to click on a result in order to satisfy their query.

Information is displayed directly on the search engine results page, so the user does not need to visit the source website.

You’ll notice this with content like

Weather forecasts:

Sports scores: 

And direct answers to simple questions:

You get all the info you need without having to click through to a website. 

The challenge for marketers and business owners has only escalated with the rise of social platforms that either penalize or outright ban the use of links. 

This makes it even more difficult to reach and engage with audiences

If you’re only publishing your best content (video, images, blogs, and guides) on your own website or behind a paywall, it’s going to go unnoticed. 

The Solution.

Make stuff for the platform you’re on. Native text posts, videos, and images. 

We call it our stand-alone strategy.

Here’s how not to do it: 

I’ve picked a random tile company on LinkedIn. But loads do it. 

Now, the idea behind this post is solid. Educational content linked to topics their ideal client would be interested in. We know that strategy works.   

But here’s the f*ck up. 

They’ve gone to all that effort of creating a collection of guides (23 in total), but only used the info on their website. 

“For more information visit our official website”

2 Likes, and we know that link isn’t getting clicked anytime soon. 

Instead, they should have shared the “how to” demonstration natively. 

People are often worried about giving away the crown jewels, but content marketing has changed. 

You’ve got to give away the good stuff up front. 

The Tile Shop “how to” could easily be shared as an image carousel on LinkedIn, a 60-second video on TikTok, or a short thread on Twitter. 

People are busy. They don’t have time to click on your link to read more. 

The best content doesn’t win. Success is down to distribution. 

“Ok, this sounds right, but I haven’t got time, I’ve got a job to do Mike”

I get it. But do what I do. 

Block out time to make long-form content. It could be educational or entertaining. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s value driven. 

Not sure where to start? Write down the questions you get asked by clients every week. 

Start by answering those. Write them down or record yourself answering the questions. 

Then repurpose the long-form content into short-form pieces suitable for whichever platform you do best on. 

Remember. It’s better to establish yourself on one platform first before migrating to others. 

That said, if you’re clever, it’s not too difficult to produce lots of different content with a system. 

In our tiling example, I would create a long “how to” video to be shared on YouTube and native on any platforms that support video. 

I’d also chop it up into a shorter 60-second version for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reels. 

Then I’d take the transcript and turn it into a short bullet point post for LinkedIn and Facebook. 

I’d then recycle that content. 

Don’t worry about sharing something you’ve already posted. There are always new followers who haven’t seen it, and chances are they won’t remember it if they have. 

The Result.

Measuring the success of a content marketing strategy can be challenging as it's not as straightforward as tracking SEO clicks or web page visits. 

However, the benefits are unmistakable. The more engagement, trust, and followers you build on social platforms, the more you'll elevate your brand and increase your chances of success. 

This effect is commonly known as 'brand lift.'

More simply, you’ll stay “top of mind” and the audience will remember you when they’re ready to buy. 

If your profile is optimised and your landing page ready to convert (full article VAMO here) you’ll be ready for them when they do, eventually, click. 

Key Takeaways.

• Play to the platform algorithms with native content. 

• Invest time in platforms that offer improved organic engagement (e.g. YouTube shorts right now). 

• The best content doesn’t win, it’s a game of distribution. 

• Bulk record long-form content and repurpose it as shorter pieces to save time. 

• Recycle old content shamelessly. 

That’s it for this week. 

As always, I’m more than happy to answer any questions about the newsletter over in the private VAMO slack community. 

Leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community.

You’ll get all of these: 

⚡1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡Access to the private Slack community

⚡Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike, Dan and the guests

⚡Community meetups

⚡Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

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That’s why pilots are taught the 1 in 60 rule.

It's a framework designed to reinforce the importance of making course evaluations and corrections.

Everyone knows you have to set goals. We love dreaming of that new destination. But few check their progress or make adjustments to make sure they actually arrive. 

In this edition, I share the simple processes and systems we use to keep our business goals on track, and how they helped us to build and exit our first start-up for 8 million quid. 

It’s an 8-minute read. I hope you find it useful.  👇

How can it help you 🫵

“I’m not a pilot Mike, how is this useful to me?“.

The 1 in 60 rule is a mental model about decision-making, evaluating your progress, and making corrections. 

All stuff (if I’m honest) I’m not particularly good at all. 

You’ve no doubt heard me talk about ‘starting with the end in mind’. 

At Learning Heroes, we wanted to create a monthly recurring revenue model and exit the business for 10 million after 3 years. 

It’s a nice line to use in podcasts when telling our story. It sounds like we had it all worked out from day one. 

In reality, that end destination evolved from a series of goals and course corrections. 

And that’s ok. It’s normal. 

If you’re anything like me, and your ‘new year, new me’ energy is waning. Crushed by the sheer amount of shit you need to get done to achieve your goals, you might find these simple systems helpful 👇

Set Goals and Get Things Done. 

You’ve probably heard of OKRs. 

Objectives and Key Results. 

It’s a goal-setting framework that works like this: 

Objectives: “What do you want to achieve?” 

Key Results: “How will you know when you’ve achieved it?”

Initiatives: “How are you going to achieve it?”

It’s been around since Back to the Future was released (all the best stuff was created in the ’80s). 

Big-name companies like Google, Intel, Spotify, and Amazon all use it. 

OKRs bridge the gap between strategy and execution. 

Now, before we continue, far more intelligent folk have talked about this topic.

In fact, there’s a free video and course you can watch here if you want to understand the full mechanics:

But I want to share how we’ve actually used them, not just more theory. 

Here’s an example:

Objective: Massively grow revenue.

Key Results: £30,000 MRR (this is the metric that lets us know we've gotten to the desired result).

Initiatives: Launch a new ‘YouTube for Business’ package (step needed to get to the result) and hire Creative Lead to project manage (action required to get the result). 

OKRs can feel a bit nerdy. If you reframe them as company commitments it can help to make them more relatable, rather than being some spreadsheet activity that no one actually looks at. 

Our goal was to make sure Learning Heroes OKRs were broad enough to encompass the whole company so that each department and team can feel that their work contributes to at least one of its priorities. 

When it comes to tracking them, we find a simple spreadsheet with a traffic light system works well: 

Whatever system you use, the goal is to visually show which OKRs are:

On Track

Lagging

Way off track 

How frequently you check in on your OKRs depends on your business size and personal preference. 

We have a weekly leadership meeting. If we notice something way off track we create a written solution to get it back on track. 

One final word of warning. Don’t bombard your business with hundreds of OKRs. 3 per quarter is achievable for most small businesses. 

Next time you’re goal-setting for the business, use the OKR framework. 

Areas of Responsibility.

Ok, so now you know what you should be doing, but who the bloody hell is going to actually do it? 

Remember. A dog with two owners never gets fed.

At IAM Productions we’re really good at coming up with ideas to improve and grow our business.

Ideas get shared, we all agree on what should be done, and we feel great.

Then, two weeks pass and nothing happened. We all get pissed off with each other and wonder what went wrong. 

If that sounds familiar, you should channel your inner Steve Jobs and be like Apple, and use areas of responsibility (AOR). 

It means grouping tasks into categories and assigning each category to one person. 

Again, no need for any fancy software. A google sheet or spreadsheet will do the trick. 

Create a new document and list every possible function in the company. Yes, all of them. 

Next to each, name a responsible person. And a backup. 

When you get super organised, add a documented process write-up column (great for training and ideal if you ever sell your business). 

It’s a great stick to beat your team with when things go wrong. Sorry, not stick. Important accountability tool. Yes, that's it. 

Ideally, everyone should be able to access and see it. Worked well for us. Give it a go. 

Get Shit Done.

Ok, you’ve set your goals and initiatives. You know who is responsible. Now it’s time to get the actual work done. 

There’s a simple system we use inspired by the book:  

Getting Things Done - David Allen 

I first came across it as a system for managing your email inbox. But it works for all types of tasks.

Your inbox is basically anywhere people bug you (Email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp).

When something arrives do four things with each job:

1. Delete/Archive

2. Delegate

3. Defer (snooze)

4. Do

If it can be done quickly (less than 2 mins) I get it done and out of the way. 

Each deferred item goes on one of these lists: 

Delegate: A list of things I’ve asked others to do and I’m waiting on. 

E.g. Chris to create a proposal for x company.

Parked: Non-urgent tasks that you might want to consider when things are less busy (warning - they never get less busy). 

E.g. book recommendation ‘F*cking Good Content by Dan Kelsall’.

Agenda: Tasks I want to discuss during our next meeting. This stops your blurting out ideas and suggestions and disrupting people from tasks. Instead, save them for a specific meeting. 

E.g. where should we have our next staff engagement day 

Projects: Bigger tasks that need calendar time to be allocated to complete. 

E.g. write a new VAMO script on x topic. 

Review your lists weekly and you should find you’re much more productive and have a nice clear inbox. 

That’s it for this week. 

That was a bit of a deter from our usual marketing and sales advice. Hopefully, you found it useful. 

We’ll be back next week with new ways to help you get seen, make more sales and grow your following. 

Thanks for being part of our VAMO community. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community.

You’ll get all of these: 

⚡1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡Access to the private Slack community

⚡Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike, Dan and the guests

⚡Community meetups

⚡Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

Welcome to this month’s free Christmas special of the VAMO Newsletter. 👋

We send weekly editions to help you market better, grow your following, and sell more. 

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed last month 👇

• How to Close Sales: A 6-Step Sales Closing Technique

• Sell like a Sniper: How to generate leads when you’re just getting started.

• Community Questions: November Edition with Ash Jones 

Subscribe to access these posts, and unlock the full back catalogue of 50+ resources. 

Subscribe now

Should I Expect a Seasonal Sales Slump? 🧑‍🎄

Up to 75% of B2B Founders say they experience some form of a seasonal sales slump. Bah Humbug. 

Our B2C friends might be enjoying their busiest time of the year, but running a B2B can be more stressful than burning your pigs in blankets. 

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

We might have singed a sausage or two, but we’ve never suffered from a seasonal slump. 

If you’re getting frustrated with the “let’s catch up again in the new year” gang, here’s how you can cope: 

#1: Don’t stop prospecting, even if decisions might not be made until the new year. 

Decision makers are planning for a big new year so show them how you can help them achieve it. 

If you accept that December is a slow month and down your prospecting tools, we guarantee you’ll have an ever slower start to next year. And quiet January’s can be fatal for businesses. 

Don’t get caught with your pants down…

A lot of businesses have budgets they need to shift before the end of the year. If you stay active, it could end up in your account. 

#2: Take advantage of others slowing down 

I don’t know about you, but we receive a lot fewer sales pitches during December. 

Fewer DMs.

Fewer e-mails.

Fewer cold calls. 

And guess what? Your prospect is likely to be experiencing the same. 

This means your pitch is competing with less competition. 

Don’t let the holiday slumber affect your motivation to do the basics. Every. Single. Day. 

Want to know how to generate leads daily? Read this 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Do this to make more sales 💲

Hey, It’s Mike 👋 Here’s my four-step process to increase the number of leads you generate and send into your sales funnel. Even though we all know the importance of leads, I see lots of small business owners ignore this part of the process. In today’s issue, I’m sharing my own sales process for generating new leads…

Read more

4 years ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Mike Winnet

#3: Increase content marketing 

Hands up who loves Christmas TV? 

Unless you’re into Mrs. Brown's Boys or Michael McIntyre Christmas specials, you’re going to be on the hunt for something decent to watch. 

And who hasn’t had a cheeky glance at their LinkedIn feed during the Christmas party? 

People love to consume during the holiday season. That’s why we put out more content in December than in any other month of the year. 

Our YouTube channel views always spike around this time of year:  

With people taking time off, there are fewer meetings and a reduced workload. By putting content marketing out consistently in December, you’ve got a great chance of getting noticed. 

But please, no tired ‘12 days of Christmas’ campaigns. If that’s the best you can come up with, it might be time for a creative break and go again in January. 

VAMO’s Favourite Christmas Ads 

What was your favourite Christmas ad this year? 

• John Lewis? 

• Aldi? 

• Tesco? 

Sadly, Mike and Dan we’re less than impressed with this year's crop. In fact, Dan said he wanted to “smash Asda in the face” for what they did to his all-time favourite Christmas movie, Elf.

But, like a little Christmas miracle, we did find one campaign that the two Grinch’s actually enjoyed. We had to go all the way back to 2017 and show them Poundland’s Naught Elf on the Shelf ads. 

They released a series of images on Twitter. One of him tea bagging a doll, one riding a donkey, and another of him watching porn in a hot tub. 

Usurpingly, the ads did get the company in a bit of bother. The angry internet mob felt they were “sexualising children's toys”. 

Even Twining’s the teabag company complained so they had to switch the tea bag for a generic one. 

As Dan frequently reminds us, all the best ad campaigns get pulled. 

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity”  

And given we’re still talking about this one all this time later, he might be right. 

Christmas Special Podcast  🎙️

The VAMO team would love you to pull up a virtual seat and join their Christmas meal in this month's VAMO podcast. 

There was booze, arguments, and we all needed a big nap after it. So, it was very much your standard Xmas lunch. 

Mike shared his Thailand experience. Lindsay Lohan convinced us to try Pilk (Pepsi and milk combined). And Mike and Dan faced off in this year's VAMO Christmas ad competition. 

Defo one to watch, which you can do here 👇

VAMO Cash Giveaway 💸

Congratulations to Nick Tyldsley who won the cash prize of £557 in our giveaway competition. 

It’s fair to say, Nick was mildly surprised the competition was real. 

This was our first experiment to see if giveaways are a useful tool to grow your following. 

The competition ran from 18/11/22 to 25/11/22 on LinkedIn and via our newsletter.

In terms of results, here are the stats: 

90 new subscribers to VIEWS ARE MY OWN mailing list

And 201 new subscribers to our YouTube channel.

Was it successful? Meh, the jury is still out . 

We’re going to monitor the performance and run additional experiments before sharing the results with you in a future newsletter. 

That’s it for this week/year. 

We Ho-Ho-Hope you have a successful end to the year, and look forward to helping you smash your sales and marketing targets in 2023. 

Thanks for being part of our VAMO community. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community.

You’ll get all of this: 

⚡1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡Access to the private Slack community

⚡Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike, Dan and the guests

⚡Community meetups

⚡Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer and makes a good last minute Christmas gift 🧠

Subscribe now

6 months ago we launched a brand new consulting service. 

Fast forward to today and we have 8 clients totalling £192,000 PA. 

When most people want to sell something new, they want to get as many customers, as fast as they can. 

Their instinct is to reach out to all potential customers in their space. 

This is a mistake. 

Spreading your resources too thin can result in few or no customers at all. 

Instead, you need to sell like a sniper. 

Here’s how I do it 👇

Strategic Marketing & Target Beachhead

Bad news. Your customer (probably) has a legacy solution in place. 

"We've invented most of the stuff that we need and now we're just messing about."
Karl Pilkington

And the big providers have far more resources than (most of) you. 

• Long-standing relationships 

• Massive marketing budget 

• Bigger sales team 

My advice? Sell your products in a different way. And don’t overstretch your limited time and resources. 

“The most significant risk of a startup is not that they moved too slowly in dominating the entire marketplace, but rather that they spread their scarce resources too thin and ended up securing few or no customers at all” 

Matt Mochary (author of The Great CEO Within) uses the analogy of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII, and calls his approach ‘Target Beachhead’. 

The Germans held the whole coastline. The Allies could have chosen to spread their invading force along the entire shore. 

If they had, they would have had one boat per beach. The Germans would have slaughtered the Allied soldiers that landed on the French beaches. 

That, of course, is not what the Allies did. Instead, they studied the coastline and found the beach that was the least well-defended (Omaha Beach in Normandy). They concentrated most of their forces on that one target beachhead and could overwhelm the German defences there and secure the toe-hold they needed. 

From there, the Allies were able to bring in more resources, expand out, and eventually spread throughout Europe.

The key is to find a small segment of the market (such as customers with a similar pain point) that has a particularly difficult problem your product/service can fix better than anyone else. 

Concentrate all of your sales and marketing efforts on them. This is your best chance of landing your first customers. 

Once you do, you’ve got testimonials to share and cash flow to scale. 

Land a few customers, and continue to sell to this small segment until you dominate. 

Now use your new (larger) resources to move onto the next level. 

3-Step Sniper Sales Plan

I spotted a great example of sniper sales from @jamierawsthorne last month. 

He was in a bit of debt and gave himself six weeks to get out of the shit or he’d have to get a job. 

7 weeks later he’d signed two contracts totalling $13k a month. 

He used a 3-step approach 👇

Step 1: Identify Target Client 

Target the affluent. In Jamie’s case, he targeted existing YouTube channels that were already spending big on YouTube but weren’t getting results.  

You can do the same. Study your marketplace. Split it into different customer types. 

Determine which segment is the least satisfied with its current solution and for whom your solution is the best fit. 

Step 2: Get in front of the target client

He’d lost his reach after giving up his own YouTube channel. 

So, each week he sent an in-depth report to a target client.  

He sent four in total and landed 50% of the people he messaged. 

One of the companies he approached (Forbes) never replied. So, he repurposed their report into a Twitter thread and LinkedIn post. 

This allowed him to share it publicly and put pressure on Forbes competitors to sign up. It worked. And a competitor signed up one week later. 

Step 3: Cold DM 

He had a lot of success with his cold DMs. Here’s why 👇

1. Kept his proposal brief with a ‘3-page report’ 

2. Added a tangible figure - the report is worth $1200

3. Added credibility - he added that he ran one of the UK's fastest-growing channels. 

4. Shared exciting results - suggested they could have one of the most successful channels on the planet. 

5. Social proof - name-dropped a contact they would trust who would vouch for him. 

Finally, you need to deliver on your promises. 

One client he signed got their most viewed video resulting in $26k in revenue (via AdSense) and 27k new subscribers. 

Decent return. 

Acquisition Vs Reactivation 

So, how did I get my 8 new clients? 

6 of the 8 are existing customers who had bought something from me before. 

Everyone loves new customers, but too many forget about the customers they already have. 

The customers you’ve worked with in the past (if you’ve done a good job for them) should be the first you target whenever you launch something new. This is your low-hanging fruit. 

But don’t forget your sniper sales approach. Don’t fire out a lazy e-mail to your existing customers: 

“Hey we’ve got a great new product for you, sign up here”

Study your dormant and existing customers and find a small group who you think would benefit most from your new offering. 

Land a few of these customers. Blow them away with service and results. 

Next, you can plan on expansion with testimonials and cash in the bank. 

Key Takeaways 

When people want to sell something new, they want to get as many customers, as fast as they can. 

This can lead to overstretched resources and failure. 

Instead, start small and focused. Sniper like. 

• Study your marketplace. 

• Split it into different customer types. 

• Determine which segment is the least satisfied with its current solution and for whom your solution is the best fit.

• Don’t neglect existing customers. 

• Send targets an exciting proposition that is brief, credible, and includes social proof. 

That’s it for this week. 

Remember, I only share stuff that’s worked for me personally. 

This was a successful strategy in my previous business and continues to work now. 

If you decide to give it a go, let me know how you get on in the slack group and if you’ve got any specific questions on this or anything else you’re stuck with, leave me a question and I’ll get back to you. 

I hope you found this useful, and I’ll be back again with more tips to sell and market your business next week. 

Cheers,

Mike

Welcome to this month’s free edition of the VAMO Newsletter. We send weekly editions to help you market better, grow your following, and sell more. 

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed last month:

1. How to beat the feast and famine cycle in your business

2. Power Statement Prospecting

Upgrade to gain access to these posts, and unlock the full back catalogue. 

Upgrade Now

New podcast episode this month 🎙️

How To Build Influential Leaders | Ash Jones (Founder of Great Influence)

Charisma. We can all usually agree when someone has it and when they’re more boring than a falafel wrap. 

This episode is an inside look at how Ash Jones has helped to build the brands of some of the UK's most influential leaders. 

Give it a watch here 👇

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon and Overcast.

In this episode, we cover 👇

01:41: Why do already famous/successful personalities need to maintain their personal brand?

03:36: Do we post on social media because we want to be liked? 

07:41: Cookbook personal brands don’t work 

19:37: Can you rescue a personal brand when someone has f*cked up bad?

29:58: What is charisma and can it be taught?

43:12: Bruce the pug goes viral 

48:00: Why all founders should have compulsory therapy sessions 

53:44: Most successful personal brand story - Gymshark

1:00:35: Best boss ever - taking your team to Ibiza and company culture

1:14:10: Is it better to post frequently or infrequently on social media? 

Production and marketing by: https://iamproductions.studio/

Does using cash giveaways to gain followers work? Or is it a big waste of money? 🤔

Everyone loves a cash giveaway, right? All you’ve got to do is hit that follow button and hand over your email address and you're in with a chance of winning some dollar. We’ve all been drawn to them as a user, but are they actually worth running?

On one hand you’re almost guaranteed to gain heaps of new followers to your socials, increase brand awareness and rocket your vanity metrics which in turn establish your authority, as accounts with larger following are taken more seriously.

But will these users stick around once the competition has finished? By running a giveaway that’s not directly aligned to your brand, do you run the risk of self sabotage? 

With an influx of new subscribers potentially more interested in the cash prize than what you actually offer, this could damage your data in the long run, causing engagement rates and open rates to fall and a mass exodus of subscribers when the competition ends.

Well, as this is VAMO and we love a test, there was only one way to find out 👇

💸 IT’S CASH GIVEAWAY TIME 💸

£557 in total. 

A handy sum to help with early Christmas shopping. 

No catch. 

You might be seeing this email for the first time because of said giveaway. If you are, welcome. We hope you enjoy the read. 

If you’re a long-standing subscriber. Don’t worry. We’ve auto-entered you into the draw.

Only 3 rules to win the cash. You must be: 

1. Subscribed to this free newsletter at the time of the draw ✅

2. Subscribe to the VAMO YouTube Channel 👇

Click Here to Subscribe to YouTube

One winner will be selected at random on the 25th of November and we'll report on how this went down in the next edition.

Good luck. 🤞

💬 Top community insight this month 

Q: 🤯 I’m totally burned out running my agency. Any advice for getting my evenings and weekends back?

Oof. We’ve all been there. When a VAMO member shared that they were feeling burned out this month, the community was quick to offer support. Team VAMO loved this response from Vicki Peers. 

If you're working evenings and weekends just to get everything done, 1 of 3 things is happening:

1. You genuinely have too much work to physically do for the team hours available - so you're not charging enough per hour/project. >>> Up your prices.  

2. You are wasting time during the day, which means it spills over into the night. Maybe you're procrastinating. Maybe you're doing too many non-income generating task (admin, unbilled work) or you're being interrupted too much and losing focus/flow.

Work out what's actually causing the stress and delegate, delete or JFDI to avoid procrastination.

Look at the cost of a VA and add that to customers' bills so you can hire more staff/increase their hours. 

Are you being interrupted because your team needs to feel more empowered, or do you need to set better boundaries? 

3. You are aiming for perfection or overdelivering.

This is inner work: 'I am enough'. Aim to stop people pleasing. You could re-read client testimonials to remind yourself you're amazing. 

Finally, know your body/rhythms. 

• When do you do your best work? 

• What time of the day are you most creative? 

• What time of the day are you no good for anything other than emails? 

• What time do you want to start work? 

• What time do you want to stop? 

Plan your days accordingly. I schedule downtime stuff into my calendar like I would a client call, so it's non-negotiable.

And I use the urgent/important matrix instead of to-do lists so when it's time to turn off the computer, I know I have done 'enough' for today and the rest is tomorrow's problem.

VAMO member reply: “Amazing advice - thank you for taking the time to respond. I am positive that I could be charging more also I'm going to bring back a hard switch-off time from tonight - really appreciated and I have taken nuggets of advice from everyone - what a great place this is! 💖”

VAMO Member Shoutout 🚀

Thomas Beresford takes the prize this month for implementing the profile advice shared by Mike and Dan in the community question section of VAMO. 

Tom: After my LinkedIn profile was featured in the latest VAMO episode - I've completely altered my LinkedIn Headline and sought to apply the lessons from the Power Statement article too.

It's now simply: Thomas Beresford - Burnout and Stress Specialist
Blowing away B.S. from your workplace

No explanation etc - that will come during discussions and the content that I put out. This whole process has helped me simplify and brought me real clarity. The annual fee has paid for itself already! What do you think of it now?

We love seeing people try out the things we suggest. Not everything will work for everyone, but if you keep implementing one of two things you pick up in the group, you should sell more, market better, and grow your following. Just like Thomas.

That’s it for this week. 

We hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community.

You’ll get all of this: 

⚡1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡Access to the private Slack community

⚡Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike, Dan and the guests

⚡Community meetups

⚡Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Upgrade to Paid

I use it in my own business, and it’s helped our paid members close big sales and save time. 

It’s a 8 minute read for anyone who wants to tidy up their pipeline in Q4 and make more sales 👇

Ever thought you had a sale in the bag, but the prospect disappears without explanation? 

Perhaps there were some emails flying back and forth, a conversation or two on the phone where they said you were “just what they needed”, and they’ll get on it and come back to you.

But they’re now no longer entertaining you. 

They’ve stopped replying to your emails and they’re screening your calls.

You’ve been ghosted.

But breaking up isn’t always a bad thing.

Sometimes it’s the healthiest thing you can do. Especially when it comes to organising your pipeline.

Knowing when you need to cut ties is the only way you’ll make the most of your time and stop wasting it on someone who’s never going to convert.

You need to move on.

There’s no point getting hung up on one prospect who has, after a couple of promising conversations, decided they’re going to drop off the face of the earth.

Breaking up means you can move on.

You’ll save wasted time ⌛️

By disqualifying a prospect, you can focus on the leads that are more likely to close in a sale.

You’ll clear your pipeline 🙌

We all want a realistic view of our pipelines, this way you’ll get rid of any loose ends.

You’ll improve your response rate 📧

In an ideal world, the close the file email will trigger a response. They’ll see you’re off to help someone else and know you’re not going to keep trying.

This is a strategy I originally shared with the private VAMO community in February and It’s resulted in some big wins for our members.

Remember, there are tonnes of reasons the prospect might have gone cold on you.

The timing isn’t right.

What you’re offering no longer suits them.

They’re getting other deals with competitors.

They don’t like to say no and think it’s easier to ghost.

They’re on holiday.

In times like this, there are only so many attempts at getting back on track that you can make before you:

A – piss them off.

B – start to look desperate.

So what do you do? 👇

Sooner or later, you need to give up the ghost (excuse the pun).

The important thing to remember here is to not whack this out too early because you’ll probably come across a little dramatic.

People have other things going on and if they have a reason for not replying yet, you might be too pushy.

Only pull this out if you’ve chased up two or three times and haven’t got anything back.

The types of people you’ll need to send it to:

👉 The fallen off the face of the earth prospects.

👉 The I don’t know yet or I’m not quite sure prospects.

👉 The playing hard to get prospects.

It’s time to call it a day. With the close the file email you’ll let them know they can contact you if they change their mind and realise that you’re about to stop chasing.

It might kick them into gear.

This means it’s not one to go straight in with, the purpose of it is to reconnect with prospects who have stopped all communication and you’re giving one last push on closing.

Either you close the file or the sale.

A good salesperson knows when to walk away.

And a huge amount of a salesperson’s time is chasing prospects that will never convert. You need to let them know that you’re glad you had the opportunity to speak, but that you’re closing them off now.

By sending an email like the one above, one of two things will happen.

They never get back to you.

You know they’re completely uninterested now and it’s over. Move on and find someone else with the same problem to sell to.

Or they come back to you with an explanation or reason for why they’ve been quiet and now you have the potential to keep the conversation going to close the sale.

But either way, you now have an answer and you can stop wasting your time.

Homework for the week 📚

Close your open files.

Go through the prospects you’ve been chasing for the last few weeks. See who hasn’t replied and has left you in limbo and send the close-the-file email.

By the end of the week, hopefully, you’ll have a list of people you can bin and no longer claim are in your sales pipeline so you can focus on who is, or you’ll have a few more conversations started back up again to close asap.

Remember: You don’t want to sound bitter.

Keep it professional and keep it positive.

This is your last chance to win them over, so you don’t want to leave it on a negative.

Knowing when to close the file is empowering. Getting used to taking yourself out of losing situations will only help you to generate more wins in the long run.

Let me know if you manage to close any deals using this tactic. 

If you do, spend £150 of it on a full membership to VAMO where you’ll get strategies like this weekly, and access to ask me and Dan questions directly. 

The Wrap-Up 

In case you missed it, here’s what the VAMO slack community has been up to throughout September.

We discussed the pricing strategy that shifts buyer preferences to your highest-margin products or services.

After reading it, you'll never look at a Starbucks menu the same again. 

Read Here

We talked about how to sell into corporates - with everyone feeling the squeeze, we wanted to show how you can get hold of budget holders. 

Trust me. Nail this and your business (if your service or product is good) will fly.

Read Here

Finally, we had Rand Fishkin (Co-Founder of Moz) explain how some companies waste ad spend by simply throwing cash at google, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

If you’re already running ads and you've been hands-off so far, this edition served as a prompt to conduct a full audit with your team.

Read Here

VAMO Member Shoutout 🚀

Jac Hughes takes the prize this month for his guerrilla marketing stunt at an Agile conference. 

Inspired by Mike’s own attempt (click here to view), Jac placed his own stickers in the toilets at the event. Thankfully, he wasn’t arrested and got some reaction on social too.

We love seeing people try out the things we suggest. Not everything will work for everyone, but if you keep implementing one of two things you pick up in the group, you should sell more, market better, and grow your following. Just like Jac. 

That’s it for this week. 

I hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community.

You’ll get all of this: 

⚡1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡Access to the private Slack community

⚡Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike, Dan and the guests

⚡Community meetups

⚡Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

See you next week!

VAMO

“I hate networking but I don’t think I do enough to build my business connections offline. WTF should I do?”

My first reaction to that question was don’t do it. They’re all paid for, bullsh*t BNI, d*ck-measuring bore-fests. 

So, I figured I better ask someone nicer than me and see if I could be convinced otherwise. 

That person was Joe Glover 👇

Joe is the creator of The Marketing Meetup. A positively lovely community with 34k+ marketers from around the world. He’s run the community for over 6 years and has worked with some of the best marketing minds in the world, such as Mark Ritson and Rory Sutherland.

If you’re part of the paid community you can watch the full podcast now with your early access.

WATCH NOW

Here are some key takeaways from what Joe had to say 👇

“You build your community before you need it.”

I think business short-termism is a real problem. 

A lot of the stuff I did six years ago within the community is paying off now. 

It’s like planting seeds. 

You have to have the mindset that you’re going to create authentic connections. 

Because when seismic shifts occur with events like the economy, you need things to fall back on. That is your community. They are your contacts. 

It’s just a bunch of people making it up together, that's how we create value.

Q: Should people join paid networking groups? 

If we approach this question as marketers, you've got your marketing lifecycle

What we’re talking about here sits really nicely in the awareness category. It’s very top-level. 

The expectation (in my experience) is that people attend to get their name out there and become known by more people. Then maybe get some business down the line. 

That expectation is accentuated at a paid event and you start using it as an acquisition channel. 

All of a sudden your marketing tactic for attending the event is shifted to gaining a short-term return. 

So, no problem with paid events. It’s all about your own expectation when you go into them. 

The whole point of networking is to have a human experience. 

Authentic. Genuine. Connections. 

My dad once said to me:

“You’ve just got to do the best you can in your own little world and then your world will get bigger”

The goal is to help people, one by one, and it’s amazing how that ripple gets so much bigger.

Q: What if you find it uncomfortable? 

Feel the fear but do it anyway. 

I crave meaningful conversation. But I can’t do small talk. So, I can be really bad at networking events. 

In fact, I’ve stood looking at my phone at events, more than I‘ve said ‘hello’. I still do that, six years into running Marting Meetup.  

But I’ve found a field I’m comfortable playing on. And that’s important. 

You develop a common thread of interest, which makes conversation easier. 

Remember that whatever nerves you’re feeling, most people attending will be experiencing the same feelings in one way or another. 

Another coping method is to go with someone else. 

Go with that person who can shove you into a conversation. 

You have to find a way to make it work for you. 

Q: How can someone increase their offline business connections? 

It’s about proactivity. 

Just drop someone a message. So often we overthink these things. It takes 2 seconds to type out a message to someone you respect, or who works in a similar industry as you. 

Don’t fear competition. There’s plenty to go around. Especially if you’ve positioned yourself correctly. 

99% of the people you meet are normal people. 

Just turn up as yourself. Literally, relax your shoulders and meet people without pressure. 

Do that consistently, and people who feel the same way gravitate toward you. 

If you do it with a genuine intent people will react in the right way. 

Thanks to Joe for appearing on the podcast.

Slightly different conversation to our usual tempo on the VAMO podcast, but I hope you get some value from it. 

Truth be told, I still think most paid groups are w*nky. 

But whilst recording the episode I did remember an interesting story. 

The first time we met our eventual buyers of my previous business was at a tradeshow event (ok, it was at the bar, but it counts).

If we hadn’t marketed our business offline, we might never have sold. 

Makes you think about what opportunities you could be missing out on if you neglect that side of your business.

Paid members can now watch the full episode with early access 📺

Homework 📚

In the book Strategic Connections (by Anne Baber), the author suggests that everyone’s network consists of four nets: 

WorkNet: includes everyone you work with on a daily basis, such as your co-workers. 

OrgNet: includes people from other departments within your organisation. 

ProNet: includes professional contacts outside your workplace. Former clients, associations etc. 

LifeNet: encompasses your family friends 

All I’d encourage you to do is ask yourself how solid your connections are in your ProNet. 

If you spot a gap, think about how you can be a more proactive networker for your business, and do as Joe says. Just drop someone a message. 

I know I need to do more. Let me know how you get on in the Slack community.

The Wrap Up 

In case you missed it, here’s what the VAMO slack community has been up to throughout August.

Dan Kelsall shared the results of his shadvertising marketing campaign. 

In VAMO, we don’t just tell you the things you should be trying. Oh no. We walk the talk. Or in this instance, create a billboard campaign showcasing the worst customer feedback we’ve received. Why? 

• It helps your brand stand out

• It crafts a tone of voice entirely different to anything else in your industry. 

• And because Dan is a sad, petty, little man. 

Did it work?  

Read Here

In this edition, Mike answered a question about launching a new business service. 

Even if you’ve got an established business, chances are you will need to launch a new product or service at some point (we’ve all been pivoting our arses off over the past two years especially).

But rushing to market without having your ducks in a row can be a reputational disaster and a waste of money. 

Over 50% of product or service launches fail. 

To avoid becoming part of that statistic, Mike shared the simple method he’s used countless times to launch his own new services. 

It’s called the magic rule of 3.

Read Here

Who knew ‘personal brand’ could be so controversial? 

Our episode with Matt and Shoaib certainly caused a stir on Linkedin.  

In this edition, Shoaib answered VAMO members' questions to help them attract and convert high-quality leads, and build and scale their online following. 

Read Here

The Rise of Personal Brand ⚡

And in case you missed it, last month we were joined in the studio by personal branding expert Shoaib Ahmed from Yello Hippo, and Matt Swain from SOCIAL CLUB. We shared our views on building a personal brand, whether everybody needs one and we'll also be discussing the dark side of building a personal brand.

View the full podcast below 👇

VAMO Member Shoutout 🚀

Jamie and his good pal Zac built one of the UK's most successful channels (team VAMO are big fans). 

Jamie has since taken a step away from creating on the channel to try something new and is coaching the next wave of YouTubers and businesses. 

Here's the channel if you want to check it out and add to that 1 million subs:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcjx6m03fZwtRBFn1Cf7kKQ

Don’t forget to share your wins in the community slack channel so we can celebrate with you.

That’s it for this week. 

We hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community

You’ll get all of this: 

⚡ 1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

⚡ Access to the private Slack community

⚡ Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

⚡ Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike and Dan

⚡ Community meetups

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

See you next week

In this week's newsletter:

We share our simple LinkedIn prospecting strategy

Recap June’s newsletters in the wrap-up

And celebrate this month's VAMO member of the month

It’s a 10-minute read. We hope you find it useful.

Hey, it’s Mike. 

I want to share with you, a simple process that I use every week to generate new leads for our creative studio. 

It’s free and takes minutes a week to complete. 

Last week it helped us close 6k in new business. 

Here’s how to do it 👇

Step 1

Go to your LinkedIn search bar. 

Type in a keyword or phrase linked to what you’d like to sell more of. 

For example, when I’m prospecting for IAM Productions, I’ll search for the terms ‘animated explainer’ and ‘video explainer’.

Step 2 

Click ‘posts’ in the nav bar. 

This will display all the recent posts on LinkedIn that include the searched term.  

Step 3 

Filter the posts by ‘date posted’. 

I typically select ‘past week’ so I’m presented with the posts that include my target phrase, from the previous 7 days.

Step 4

You’ll likely come across competitors posting content using those keywords. 

Don’t be put off. 

If you’ve read my waffle house strategy newsletter this is a great place to put it to work. 

Waffle house, in a nutshell, is where you strategically follow people in your niche and comment on their posts to grow your own audience. 

Full breakdown here

It works. Mark, and others in the Slack group, have been sharing their wins. 

Step 5 

Now focus on the people who are looking for the product or service you sell. 

Like this example:

Step 6 

Now it’s time to pitch with a comment. 

Make it clear what you offer, and why they should be interested. Like this: 

I typically recommend Ian Darlington, then tag the business page for IAM. 

I also ask the rest of the team to connect or follow the person so we collectively grow the IAM network. 

Summary ⚡

Trust me. It might sound basic. But it works. 

I fill up our pipeline of leads every week by following this simple prospecting strategy. 

If you have a sales team, set a new task for one or two of them to follow this process. Twice weekly, and track results.  

If you’re a solopreneur or don’t have a sales team yet. Block some time in your diary twice weekly (this will stop you from putting it off or forgetting). 

It’s a process that takes 5-10 minutes a day. 

Done right. Consistently. You’ll win new business. 

When you do, make sure to reinvest some of that cash into paid VAMO subscription so you can get tips like this every week.

Subscribe now

Homework 📚

This week, I’d like you to first identify the keyword(s) that are relevant to the stuff you sell. 

Then I’d like you to give the process a go:

Search for your keywords on LinkedIn. 

Filter by the past 7 days. 

Add your waffle house comments on competitor posts. 

Pitch your services in the comments on relevant posts. 

Connect with people actively looking to buy your product or services. 

Try it for a week. 

Don’t be put off if you don’t see an immediate return. 

Prospecting is hard, often soul-destroying, work. But when you get one or two new leads converting, you’ll get hooked!

The Wrap Up 

In case you missed it here’s what we’ve been up to throughout June. 

Pricing Strategies That Keep You Growing 🚀

With most of us feeling the financial squeeze, the VAMO team wanted to share some advice and strategies so you can confidently raise your prices.

Robin Waite (Founder of Fearless Business) and business owner Jon Stone shared 3 simple tips with our private community. 

We gave them a go, and it gave us the confidence to increase prices from £2499 to £2999 for one of our IAM Productions products. 

And it hasn’t slowed sales down one bit.

Full article here

Billboards on a Budget 💸

Dan is a big advocate of alternative marketing. 

In his June newsletter, he encouraged smaller brands and businesses (previously too scared to try it) to give it a go. 

He also shared a tool he uses to run big city-wide billboard campaigns, without breaking the bank.

Full article here

Too Old For TikTok? 👴👵

The final newsletter of the month was for anyone curious about marketing on TikTok but hasn’t got a clue where to start. 

We spoke to two experts on how anyone can start on the platform and the VAMO team shared the results of our own TikTok experiment (including a handy template for maximising UI on the platform). 

Full article here

All of our VAMO newsletters come with a coaching video 🎥

Meaning you can consume the tips and strategies we share by: 

• 📺 Watching 

• 📚 Reading 

• 🎧 Or Listening 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe for £150 for the year.

Subscribe now

Member of the month 😍

Business can be tough. 

So, when a member of the VAMO community has a win, it’s important that we celebrate it. 

The accomplishments don’t have to be large or grandiose. They just have to mean something to us. 

With that in mind, we wanted to give a shout-out to VAMO member, Mark Simpson. 

Mark has had a really good year. 

We’ve been tracking Mark’s progress following a 1-2-1 session with Mike & Ian, 

And he’s recently hit $1m in direct sales. 

The VAMO team is proud of your achievements, Mark 👏

Check out Mark’s profile here.

We can’t wait to see how his story progresses. 

AOB 

Mark very nearly lost his crown to Debbie Jenkins, after she posted a long-forgotten photo of Mike in the private slack group. 

The image has been pixelated to protect Mike’s carefully managed social profile.

It does include a vest and a slit eyebrow🤣.

The 1st VAMO Community Meet-Up has been confirmed 🥳

Having an online community is great but we know to build a really strong community, that helps each other succeed, nothing beats face-to-face meetups every now and then.

So, with that in mind, we've now got our first community meet-up booked!

This isn’t a balls to the wall, throwing up in a bin and embarrassing ourselves "party". It's more of a chilled event, so we can all meet, chat, have a laugh, and get hang out.

Pet Corner 🐱🐶

Finally (and because grumpy Mike threatened to delete pet corner - don’t worry, he hasn’t got access) we wanted to share this very good boy. 

Nick McDonald, a new VAMO member this month, shared him with us. But what is his name Nick? Let us know in the Slack group. 

A group dog walk is defo on the VAMO community road map so we can hang out with them all. 

That’s it for this week. 

We hope you found it useful. 

If you’ve not already, don’t forget to subscribe to our paid community here.

You’ll get all of this: 

1 x email per week that covers sales/marketing/grow your following with a coaching video.

Access to the private Slack community

Early access to watch the VAMO Podcast (1 week early)

Submit questions to be answered on the VAMO Podcast by Mike and Dan

Community meetups

Early access and discount to training sessions

For £150 for the year, it’s a real no-brainer 🧠

Subscribe now

See you next week,

Team VAMO

Firstly, we launched the VAMO Podcast on both YouTube and Spotify to make consuming our content easier and more accessible. Yes, you really can get VAMO in your eyes, as well as your ears, wherever and whenever you like.

If you haven’t subscribed to YouTube or Spotify already you can here.

Secondly, a huge thank you to the paid VAMO community for the conversations and Q’s in our private Slack that gives us the topics for our weekly newsletters, and coaching videos so we can help you grow your businesses, generate more leads and sell more stuff.

And (let’s be honest) that’s what you really want from a business community, isn’t it?

As promised, we’ll be inviting all paid members to our first ever in-person meetup in Manchester at the end of July. Details to follow in Slack, next week.

As this is the monthly wrap-up here’s some of the things we’ve been doing that you might have missed. 👇

👉 The no-budget “Waffle House" marketing strategy challenge.

👉 How we hijacked Gymshark’s audience and why you should try permission-less marketing.

👉 Things you need to avoid if you’re planning on selling your business in the future

The marketing strategy that needs no budget. 🧇

What if I told you there was a company that has zero marketing budget but has managed to open 2,100 restaurants across 25 states & post $1.3 billion annual revenue?

How did they do it?

Well, they strategically placed their Waffle Houses on high traffic routes in and around other popular businesses - like Walmart and Target.

What if I told you that can copy this pretty simple strategy online to grow your followers?

In this newsletter, we broke down The Waffle House Marketing Strategy and we’re all putting it to the test in June.

Here’s roughly how it works 👇

Identify 20-30 stars in your industry/niche that get a lot of attention whenever they post content.

These “stars” are popular content creators, in your niche, that generate lots of traffic.

They’re your version of “Walmart” and their posts talk about the things your ideal client cares about and engages with.

You need to create a list with 30 “stars” on any platform you’re looking to grow. In my example it’s both Twitter and LinkedIn. I used Excel, as I’m old like that.

I don’t care what you use or where you keep it, just do it.

Look at their posts from the previous 24 hours identifying which one is the most popular.

If a popular voice in your industry is talking about a topic and it’s attracting engagement, you need to be in around this conversation so your ideal client knows you exist.

Add a valuable comment on this post that expands on the original idea.

This is important. You don’t just slap any old comment on these posts. You need to strategically post a high-value comment that’ll get the attention of the “stars” audience. These comments are your Waffle Houses.

You’re putting your content in the places your ideal client is visiting, adding value and you’ll gain followers as a consequence. Clever, eh?

Well, it gets better…

Use these comments to test content ideas so when you post your own content - it bangs💥

One risk with creating written (or video) content is you never know if it will fly or die. Well, the Waffle House Strategy removes a lot of the guesswork for you.

If you track how popular your “waffle house” comments using “likes” on LinkedIn or the “tweet analytics” button (like below) on Twitter. You’ll know have a clear indication of the type of topics your ideal client wants to see as can turn them into “proper” posts.

The results?

I’ve seen a big improvement in my engagement and my audience has started growing again and have seen some people reporting a 300% increase in followers using this strategy.

I’ve also reduced my number of dud posts as I’ve taken some of the guesswork out of content creation. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

If you’d like to read this in more detail & join the VAMO challenge, click below 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

The marketing strategy that needs no budget. 🧇

Hey, Mike here 👋 This week I wanted to share with you a cool strategy that it turns out I’ve been “half” doing since my Learning Heroes days and waaaaayyy before I knew what it was called. Traditionally, when I was building an audience on LinkedIn I’d look at who the “movers and shakers” were (god, I’m old!) in the niche I was selling in and keep an eye on the type of content they’d post…

Read more

4 years ago · 21 likes · 11 comments · Mike Winnet

How we hijacked Gymshark's audience 🦈

You may remember the controversy in April with Thursday asking creatives to do unpaid work?

If you’ve not seen that video on our YouTube channel you can catch up here 👇

Well, last month I took the calculated risk to do some free work for a big brand and to share with the VAMO community exactly what I did, the strategy behind it and the results (good or bad).

When it comes to marketing I’ve always gone with the line…

‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’

It started when a cool recruitment campaign was posted by Gymshark founder, Ben Francis.

For those that don’t know, I do have a “proper” business. Yes, I don’t just talk rubbish about marketing and sales in newsletters & YouTube. I actually do sales and marketing in a “proper” business that sells actual real stuff.

Is that a little dig at some other business communities run by other people?

You’re damn right it is! 🔫

IAM Productions is my video explainer business. We make animated explainers when companies want to explain something to their audience, usually as adverts, on their website, landing pages, company pages or on their socials etc etc

After seeing this Ben Francis post on LinkedIn I felt it was the perfect opportunity for IAM Productions to create some Gymshark content, whether they wanted it or not!

We took part of the advert and created Gymshark a short animated explainer video, tagging in the main people at Gymshark on social media for a nibble.

It was viewed by more over 100k people and was liked and shared by key members of the Gymshark marketing team. 

Job done. 

If you want to read a detailed breakdown of this case study so you can implement it in your business, you can read that newsletter in full here.

Spoiler Alert

It does come with some risk, though …  

Noel (Chief Brand Officer) did give us a little scare with his comment. 👇

But as I said: “ask for forgiveness, not permission”

If you’re not willing to take risks with your marketing, you’re never going to stand out. 

We’re now connected to the marketing team at a big brand we’d like to work with and other big brands have seen our work.

If they ever need animation work, IAM Productions is front of mind. 

If you’d like to learn more about permission-less marketing and how you and your business can use it to win big clients

Click to read the full case study below 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

How we hijacked Gymshark's audience 🦈

Hey, It’s Mike 👋 Here’s a simple trick that has helped me to bring in leads and grow my following. It’s called permissionless co-marketing. Here’s how it works 👇…

Read more

4 years ago · 9 likes · Mike Winnet

Thinking of selling your business? Avoid these deal killers 💀

Bit niche this one and was more for the business owners in the VAMO community.

We don’t always “win” in business and there are plenty of things I wished I’d done differently. So when I was asked in our private slack group about what I learned when selling my business, I wanted to share 3 (almost) catastrophic mistakes that nearly stopped the £8m sale from happening at all.

Here’s that newsletter summarised below 👇

Not having the right contracts in place.

Sounds mad but, even though we hired our freelance team and paid them to create courses for our business it turned out that legally we didn’t actually own the IP so the courses didn't sit on our balance sheet.

Have you got the right contracts in place with your freelancers?

Having a 💩 accountant

They hadn’t worked with a business like ours before or dealt with a sale of this size before and we nearly paid the price.

If you do anything with this newsletter make sure it’s getting monthly management accounts in place and making sure you’ve got a decent accountant.

Sack Yourself from the business

I get it. The business is your baby, but you need to show potential buyers you’re not the hardest working, busiest fool in the business.

You need to remove yourself from all processes and operations manuals – and sack yourself.

If you don’t then the potential buyers might not want to buy your business or they’ll want to tie you in for 24-48 months as they do a handover.

Click to read the full post below 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Thinking of selling your business? Avoid these deal killers 💀

Hello 👋 it’s Mike. It’s never too early to start planning for exit. Even if you’ve got no immediate plans to sell your business, the time will come when you want to move on or retire. In order to get the maximum return and not screw up the sale, there are some simple tasks you should be doing right now…

Read more

4 years ago · 6 likes · Mike Winnet

There’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Did you know if you’re in the paid community you can ask questions you want help with?

Our team are on hand to give you the answers you need to help you grow your business, get better at marketing and make more money.

If we don’t have the knowledge we’ll get our little black book out and get some of the best experts around to help you?

Here’s one of our favourites from last month about business cards. 👇

It’s these questions that help us grow the coaching section of Views Are My Own.

If you’ve got a question you’d like answering you can join and ask it in our private Slack community by subscribing below 👇

Subscribe now

Early access to Episode 7 of the VAMO podcast is now available 📺

This month we’re sharing our views on:

Swearing in marketing

What to do when people rip-off your content

Toxic positivity

Plus for the paid community we’ve got an extended coaching section to help you

Generate new business leads from TikTok

Create a successful (low cost) billboard campaign

How to raise your prices & increase your profits.

Paid members: if you want to head over to watch the latest episode now then click here. 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

S1 E7: SWEARING IN MARKETING, PLAGIARISM & TOXIC POSITIVITY

Watch now (68 min) | On this episode, Mike, Dan and the VAMO team give their views on swearing in marketing, plagiarism that’s rife on social media and the rise of toxic positivity. Plus, we answer questions submitted by the VAMO Community: How to generate new business leads from TikTok…

Read more

4 years ago · Mike Winnet and Dan Kelsall

Free members - it costs just £150 a year to access all this extra content & get our weekly coaching - so subscribe now and get 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing over the next 12 months.

Here’s a simple trick that has helped me to bring in leads and grow my following.

It’s called permissionless co-marketing. 

Here’s how it works 👇

I’ve got a decent following across socials so getting eyes on my content is relatively simple.  

But what can you do when you’re just starting out, or don’t have the following yet? 

You hijack someone else's audience. 

It’s a strategy called permissionless co-marketing. 

I’ve been doing it for years, but only recently came across that terminology. 

Credit: Amanda Natividad (She’s a great follow on Twitter BTW)

The aim is to align yourself with other brands or individuals by promoting them in your work. 

Why? 

It elevates your brand. 

Your earn goodwill. 

There’s potential for reciprocation.

I often use this tactic on the IAM Productions LinkedIn business page.  

We’ve grown this to 4k+ followers in a relatively short time frame.

The first step is to identify brands that are on-trend, and that share our target audience. 

But make sure they’re not direct competitors.

Here’s an example I recently shared: 

Company: GymShark

Industry: Fitness Apparel

Linked Followers: 189K

Key Figures: Ben Francis, Noel Mack, Elfried Samba

Target: Active marketing team on LinkedIn (combined audience of 510k). 

We spotted that they’d shared a successful ad campaign on their socials that we liked the look of.

It was a recruitment ad with some clever copy.

We then turned the ad into a short animated explainer video.

We then tagged Ben, Noel and Elfried looking for a nibble.  

It was viewed by 100k people and was liked and shared by key members of the Gymshark marketing team. 

Job done. 

It does mean taking a risk. 

Noel (Chief Brand Officer) did give us a little scare with his comment, lord knows I don’t need any more legal letters! 

But we’ve always gone with the line:

‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’

… when it comes to marketing. 

If you’re not willing to take risks with your marketing, you’re never going to stand out. 

The point isn’t to trick anyone. It’s about elevating your brand. 

We’re now connected to the marketing team at a big brand we’d like to work with.  

If they ever need animation work, we’re front of mind. 

Plus, we’ve already secured new work from other businesses that loved what we created for them. 

Win-win. 

It can work with individuals too. 

Start by identifying an individual you respect with a decent following, and name-drop them in one of your posts. 

We’ve done this with Daniel Priestley in the past. 

He’s someone we came across when filming the Contreprneur formula. We liked what he was about. And he has an engaged audience of small business owners. Perfect for our explainer business. 

So, we shared a quote of his about lead generation on our company page. 

Daniel liked and engaged with the post 💗

Again, we didn’t ask if we could do a co-marketing piece. 

It’s a low-effort strategy. If Daniel didn’t like the post, it’s easy to delete. 

The potential rewards far outweigh the risks of getting it wrong IMO. 

Remember that line: Ask for forgiveness, not permission. 

If you do it right, you’ll build relationships and open more formal co-marketing or partnerships down the line. 

Reciprocity is basic human psychology. 

If you’re constantly name-dropping and celebrating others' work, it won't be long before they’re doing the same for you. 

Finally, a few things to avoid. 

Don’t randomly drop names into your posts because they’ve got a big following. Make sure the person or brand is relevant to what you sell. 

Don’t spam tag loads of people into your posts. 

Don’t push competitors. Not everyone agrees with my strategy when it comes to competitors. But I see them as the enemy, and why give them free press?

Homework 📚

Dead easy this one. 

Identify an individual or brand you respect and give them a shout-out on your socials. 

No budget required. Just your time and creativity. 

Your aim is to: 

Elevate your brand. 

Earn goodwill. 

And potentially get a shout-out back. 

If you’re stuck with how to start, DM me on slack, and I’ll help you out.

That’s all for this newsletter.

A simple budget-friendly strategy to get more eyes on your business.  

Give it a go and let me know how you get on. 

It’s a low-cost, low-effort strategy you can build into your marketing. 

It’s worked for me. 

As always, if you’re unsure about anything covered, or have a specific question you’d like to answer, post a question in the slack community, or DM me. 

See you again next week. 

Cheers,

Mike

We’ve gone from not knowing if anyone would be interested in our opinions, to a community of over 4000 people in no time. 

So, we thought it was a good idea to remind you of what you get with your VAMO subscription and show off some new features.  

We’ll keep it brief 👇

VAMO is now on YouTube & Spotify 🤘

The VIEWS ARE MY OWN Podcast is now available on YouTube and Spotify. Over the past couple of weeks, the team have been working hard to improve our monthly show.

We’ve extended the length, switched up the format, updated the set (it’s a work in progress) and added an extra section for our paid community.

So If you’re one of the 300 members in the paid community, you’ll get:

👉 Early access to the VAMO Monthly Podcast (1 Week Early)

👉 Help us produce the show by suggesting topics and asking us questions in the private Slack Community.

👉 Exclusive access to our NEW coaching section. Mike, Dan and our favourite guest experts will answer your questions in-depth right after the podcast episode.

If you’re one of our 4,000 + free community members you’ll get:

👉 Access to the VAMO Monthly Podcast on YouTube and Spotify

We understand that not everybody can afford a subscription so this way the whole community gets the chance to be involved with the VAMO Podcast.

Watch the new episode below 👇

In this episode, we covered: 

Shock marketing. Is using Madeline McCann taking marketing too far? 

Was Thursday CEO George taking the piss by asking creatives to work for free? 

Should you jump on the marketing bandwagon? 

We’d ask you to ‘go smash that subscribe button’ but we’re in our mid to late 30s and past all that.  But if you wanna… just click the button below. 👇

Subscribe to our YouTube

If you like to watch or listen to the podcast, check out our Spotify below and save us t your favourites!

Watch & Listen on Spotify

Newsletter 📧

Paid community, you’ll be getting a newsletter every Tuesday with actionable advice to help you sell more, market better, and grow your following. 

We’ll share what has worked in the past, plus things we’re trying right now so we can learn together. 

We understand newsletters can get lost in your mailbox. So we’ve redesigned the VAMO homepage to make it easier to access what you need when you need it. 

Show me

For the free community, you’ll get one newsletter rounding up the topics we’ve covered that month so you can decide if you want to get involved. 

As the community grows, we’ll try and share more advice via the free newsletter so no one misses out. 

Community 📢

Paid members get access to our private Slack channel. 

This is where you’ve got 1-2-1 access to Mike and the VAMO team. 

Whatever you’re stuck with, drop us a message. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll use Mike and Dan’s connections to get you an answer. 

We’ve already got answers from:

I’m Justin and i’m building a portfolio of one-person businesses to $5M in revenue.

I spent the last decade building two $50M+ ARR companies, teams of 150+ people, and raising over $300M in venture capital. Then, in 2019, I walked away from my executive job at a high-growth startup to build my own portfolio of one-person businesses.

Read more here

I’m a YouTube consultant using a data-based approach to help build the world’s biggest channels. 

Some quick fire facts 👇

👉 Over 12 years experience on YouTube

👉 Worked on videos with a combined 1 billion views

👉 Worked with creators totalling 250m subscribers

👉 Built my personal channel to 360k+ subscribers 

Read more here

Plus, there are now 300 members ready to support you in the group. 

If you’ve not left a question before, head over to the slack channel and ask us anything. If you haven’t got a clue what Slack is or how to set it up, reply to this email and we’ll get you sorted. 

Socials 📱

You can now follow us in more places:

YouTube

TikTok

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

We want to make this the biggest, most useful sales and marketing community around. So, if you think someone might enjoy the content we put out, give us a share and like when you can. 

VAMO Meet Up 👋

In July we’ll be having our first meet-up for VAMO members.  

Running a business can be a lonely place, so we thought it might be nice to meet up for a social every now and then. 

They’re free events that we’ll organise as often as we can. 

All details will be shared in the announcement section of the Slack community soon but the first will be 100% in Manchester.

That’s all for this update. 

Your support and involvement at this early stage is really appreciated, and it motivates us to deliver for you. ✊

See you soon. 

Mike, Dan and the VAMO Team

Over the last few weeks we’ve covered: 👇

💭 Making your video content more engaging 

💭 Improving your sales conversions in one quick way

💭 Why sacking your clients is good for business

📺 And episode 6 is here. On it, Mike, Dan give their views on shock tactics, working for free and jumping on the bandwagon. Plus all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month. We’ve got a new set-up, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

If this email’s been forwarded to you, subscribe here so you don’t miss another.

Subscribe now

This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid. 

Paid, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

Watch Episode

💭 Using engagement triggers in your video content - our final thoughts.

Comment from the community: 

The tips were brilliant, some quick wins (engagement hook) and some to build in (location changes or animation) - we’re already re-recording some of our videos and I feel way better about them, even before they get edited.

It’s 2022. Let’s be honest, there’s no reason to be creating shit video content. 📹

Whether you’re a one-person band or a multi-million-pound company with hundreds of employees - there’s so much out there on how to create decent content, if you’re not improving slightly every time, then you need to ask why? 

Some small businesses create better content with their phone than large businesses do with their entire marketing team. 

You don’t need to be smart and you don’t want to start annoying your viewers by making things confusing or having too much going on. 

You just want to use prompts as a trigger to pay attention, something that makes someone refresh their gaze and zone back into what you’re talking about. It all starts with researching your audience and knowing what they want to see, in a way that they want to see it, and then editing and filming the footage in a way that keeps people awake. 

Easy, right?

💭 Some of what Mike said:

With our content, you’ll notice we include words on screen, animation, and cutaways to other videos. 

We’re always doing something that triggers you to sit up and refresh your attention. If you’ve got someone sitting on a plain wall background, talking to the camera for 3 minutes in a monotonous voice it’s going to be boring and nobody is going to watch. So there’s no point making it in the first place. 

💭 And some of what Dan said:

With video, you need engagement triggers. And engagement triggers need to be happening at least every 15 seconds, some people say every 30 seconds. 

An engagement trigger is like a hook, it’s something that keeps people watching. So for instance, if you're a really boring fucking company talking about accounting software, right, you might have someone drop their pants every 15 seconds, just because it's weird and it breaks the monotony enough that people will then keep watching because they'll be watching for the next pants drop.

You're expecting someone in the world of social media to stop what they're doing, amongst all the other content they actually want to watch and they actually know about, you're asking them to stop what they're doing and watch a minute-long video from someone they don't know don't give a fuck about. 

We gave the community 8 quick and easy engagement triggers that you can try in your next round of video content to stop people from clicking off after 10 seconds. 

None of them are going to break the bank (most can be done on free editing software), and don’t worry, they can almost all be done by someone with very little editing experience - so what’s your excuse? 👀

Our community has started incorporating them into their videos and they’re looking tons better already. 

If you want to read more on how to engage your audience better on video and keep up good viewer retention, here she is 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Use these triggers to create more engaging video content. 📹

👋 This week: 💭 Create more engaging video content 💭 Pattern interrupts and how to use them As we always say, you don’t need to action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes

💭 Improve your sales conversions by 100x - is it possible?

Comment from the community: 

Interesting stuff.

Our CRM sends an enquiry acknowledgement to customers straight away but I don't feel like it's personal enough. Naturally a lot of our enquiries come in out of office hours. Maybe I could extols the virtues of the improved conversion rate on the sales team.

Start by responding to them myself 😄

Not replying to leads within 5 minutes is killing your business. It sounds dramatic, but it is.

And we’re not just saying that, there are real stats done by real stats people to back it up. 

A study by LeadResponseManagement.org found that when B2B sales teams get back to leads in less than 5 minutes, their engagement and conversion rate multiplies drastically. 

But when it’s just you, or you’ve not yet got a sales team to filter your enquiries, it’s unrealistic to think you’re going to be replying to every lead that comes through within 5 minutes. 

So what does that mean for you? No more clients? Sales plummet? Family exile you because of your poor lead response time and you’re forced to live alone on a tropical island with only a volleyball to keep you company? 

When a lead gets in touch with a business, they’re almost ready to buy and 70% of the way through the buying decision. So, when they can’t get in touch, they’re off to a competitor.

As business owners, we don't like to appear salesy or come across as desperate. We assume our prospects feel the same way and that means we shy away from it.  

But the data actually says different…

Businesses that respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100x more likely to convert opportunities.

The problem is, on average, it takes B2B sales teams 42 hours to respond to a new lead, if at all, and 38% of those leads never reply.

We gave our community a handful of ways to overcome this slight issue. Here are 3 of them.

👉 Automate your lead notifications so you can’t miss them.

Mike’s business IAM studio uses Zapier, Pipedrive and Slack for notifying that there’s a new lead dropping in so everyone gets the ping. 

👉 Give self-service options.

If you find your customers are usually asking the same things over and over again, do something about it. 

👉Build a brand community.

It’s what everyone is doing, and it comes in extra handy at times like this.

Work out your lead response rate time:

⏱ Time/date of new lead - time/date of follow-up response = # time passed to respond

⌛️ Sum of time passed to respond for all leads/number of contacts = average time passed to respond.

What is it? Probably not under five minutes. 👀

So if you want to read more info on what we mean by automating, self-service and building a community you can head over and read the full details on the newsletter, plus the other couple of tips we’ve tried and tested for ourselves and found helpful.  

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Improve your sales conversions by 100x with these easy steps.

👋 This week: 💭 Why you need to reply to sales enquiries within 5 minutes 💭 How Mike’s business IAM manages to do it 💭 What to do if you can’t respond quickly As we always say, you don’t need to action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business l…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes · 3 comments

💭 Why “sacking” your clients is good for business - our last words on it.

❝ Comments from the community: 

Just read the blog post now and 💯% agree

After being in hospitality I have a much lower tolerance than most on this. I will sack a client straight away if it’s starting to get “tetchy”. Full refund, wish them the best and move on.

Don’t try and fix and focus on something bad when you can focus on the good relationships which will result in a better outcome.

It's something that took me years to get my head around (all that usual fear of not finding other clients) but once I did it made a big shift in business.

Great blog btw. Great read.

Not all customers and invoices are created equal.

But just because a client is difficult or you find them challenging to work with, doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be fired. Part of your job is to make clients happy - even the annoying ones.

Assuming you’ve experienced working with difficult people who put you in difficult situations, and that you also understand that in business as well as life, we don’t always get what we want.

Although if said client starts getting in the way of you being able to do your job properly, then we don’t blame you. Chop them.

Reasons we reckon it’ll be chop worthy:

1. If you’ve at least tried making the situation better and it’s still, well, shit. 

2. If they’re making you lose money.

3. If your team morale is suffering.

Any of the above are absolutely good enough reasons to part ways with a client. 

But you need to question - is it a you-shaped problem?

Do you not like working with someone because they challenge you on things you create? This one can go either way, because if they’re always trying to change the work you do for them then it’s likely you’re not the right person for their job, in which case, you should part ways and they can find someone who is.

But you might also be letting your ego get in the way of what the client wants and what you think is best. If you think what’s best isn’t what they’re suggesting, communicate your reasons why. Explain why you think what you’re producing is bang on the money and why you did it this way.

A client isn’t an idiot just because they didn’t love your proposal or work, maybe you’re the idiot for not listening to what the direction was that you needed to take with it. But then again, maybe they are an idiot for not listening to someone who knows best at what they do - there’s a fine line.

We spoke loads more about it in the newsletter and gave some tips on how to do the sacking-off in an as amicable a way as possible. 

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Why “sacking” your clients is good for business.

👋 This week: 💭 Why sacking your clients is good for business 💭 How Mike and Dan have done it in the past As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment

 Our community were very heavily weighted with this one, too. Over the last few days there’s been loads of discussion about sacking clients and why it’s been the best thing they did.

Really helpful with getting me clear on what clients I need to sack and the best way to do it - so I can make more money with the clients I enjoy working with, instead. Thanks VAMO

If you’re not in the Slack and you’re a member of our private community (you get the paid weekly newsletters) then whack us an email and we’ll sort you out. 

👉 hello@viewsaremyown.social 

What are your thoughts on sacking a client? Ever done it? Regretted it immediately or never looked back? Let us know in the comments. 

Leave a comment

Want more detailed help and guidance with your business goals? 🤑

We’ve recently had a couple of community members (Mark Simpson, Peter Sumpton and Danny Donachie) in the VAMO office for a deeper dive on their businesses. 

So if you’re looking for more support and want clarity or advice on what you’re doing, what else you could be doing or how you can get there, we have now launched 1-2-1’s with Mike Winnet & Ian Darlington. You’ll hear us reference a lot about the previous business they built and sold and the ones they’re currently running. 

If you want a 60-90 minute session we can do it either over Zoom or in person. To enquire and book, use the link below and find a time that suits you. 👏

Book a consultation

This is a free and public drop of our weekly newsletter. That means you can share it and we’d really love it if you did. 

To friends, colleagues or to socials - it all helps us out. We’re funded by the paid subscriptions and everything we make goes back into being able to create them. If you wanted to help us out, you can click down here.  👇

Share VIEWS ARE MY OWN

As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode six are. 👏

And if you’re not in the private community and you want a bit more info on it before you decide to join us, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.

Again, all of you paid lot, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

Watch Episode

See you next Tuesday.

VAMO 📺

This week:

💭 Why sacking your clients is good for business

💭 How Mike and Dan have done it in the past

As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

If this email’s been forwarded to you, subscribe here so you don’t miss another.

Subscribe now

Q from the community:

How would you “bin” a client or decide if someone is worth binning? I hate working with some. When I took them on I needed the business and I didn’t know how they’d be to work with, but now I no longer want to work with them and I’m not sure how to go about cutting ties amicably.

💭 Mike

Not all customers and invoices are created equal.

My own experience is that it’s usually the lowest-paying customers that cause the most hassle and expect a lot more from you for their money. In relative terms the cost of services might be a lot to them, so the investment and need for it to work is no lower than someone spending 6 times the amount, but those who do spend more usually have a better understanding of how things like that work and what to expect.

In my previous business, after we’d sold, they increased their prices by 40% knowing it would mean they lost a % of the lowest paying but highest hassle clients. It meant that they made the same money with fewer clients and could give them a better service that they didn’t begrudge - makes sense, right?

That’s how they “sacked” some of their clients, but they had the luxury of that to hide behind, if you’ve not got a big company name to do the same behind and it’s YOU doing the firing, it can be awkward.

💭 Dan

There are loads of reasons to sack clients.

The first is if they’re taking up far too much time, expecting too many changes, or imposing their will too much on your work to the point where it’s barely even profitable, you’ve got to ask yourself whether it’s worth keeping that client on. And 9 times out of 10… it’s not.

The next is if they’re having a negative impact on your team and their morale because at the end of the day, everyone knows how fucking hard it is recruiting people for your team, and if you’re in the creative industry fuck me it’s always been hard to get the right team together, so if you’ve got one client who’s negatively impacting them and not only their work but the work they’re doing for other clients, you’ve got to ask yourself again if it’s worth retaining that client for the sake of your team.

The process for us is simple, just have a really open and honest conversation with the client and just explain it’s not right, it’s not working for you and they’re probably better off going elsewhere.

We’ve all been in the position of working with someone we dread.

You know every conversation is going to be difficult, they don’t see your vision and you’d rather get your sleeve stuck on a door handle every time you walk past it for the rest of your life than do another day of the work you’re having to produce for them.

But surely the perks of working for yourself, or within a business where you have significant control over what you do and don’t do, should include having a say in whether or not you get out of bed for work you enjoy with people who respect your time.

One of the reasons we get into business is to stop answering to other people who make life difficult. And the bonus is that there’s a huge amount of work out there at the moment, so if you hate working with a certain client then let someone else fill that spot.

If you’re worried you’ll struggle to replace them or it’ll be at a detriment to how much money you’ve made at the end of the month, you might want to start looking at how you’re positioning yourself in the market. There are always ways to make yourself more attractive as a business and if you’re fixing a problem for someone, why wouldn’t they use you?

Whether it happens early in your relationship or starts to deteriorate after years of working together, once it goes wrong, it can cause more than just problems for your sanity - like Dan said, if it causes your team to struggle at work, it can start to get in the way of other clients and inevitably your accounts.

That's why, sometimes, you have to make the call and get rid.

We did a newsletter on identifying your target enemy - you can read it here 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Push people away with your marketing. 🎯

👋 This week: 💭 Why an ideal client isn’t enough 💭 How to identify your target enemy 💭 Create better content by deciding who you’re not posting for As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing a…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes

It was all about how to go about deciding who you don’t want to work with so you can narrow down how to properly find who you do. It should save you from having to have these conversations with people when they turn out to be an absolute nightmare.

If there are red flags at the beginning then it’s easy to overlook them and bring someone on board because of the money, but we reckon you should always trust your gut and if you think someone’s going to be difficult, they probably are.

Whether they talk over you in meetings, question your quotes and payment terms, or disregard comms you send them, you know you’re locking yourself into that for a few months. Is it worth it?

How do you decide if it’s time to show someone the door? 🚪

So just because a client is difficult or you find them challenging to work with, doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be fired. Part of your job is to make clients happy - even the annoying ones.

Some people are difficult but it’s not the end of the world, you can get on with it and still achieve what you need to. In an ideal world we’d all only work with people we want to and everyone would say please and thank you, but we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in the real one.

Assuming you’ve experienced working with difficult people who put you in difficult situations, and that you also understand that in business as well as life, we don’t always get what we want.

But if said client starts getting in the way of you being able to do your job properly, then we don’t blame you. Chop them.

Have you at least tried making the situation better?

Sometimes there’s miscommunication between you and a client. You get annoyed at them for it and they get annoyed at you, but probably neither are at fault and it doesn’t mean you need to terminate any contracts. If you don’t know why they’re unhappy or being difficult, and they think you’re not doing as they expected, sorting out your communication might be the first step.

Think about: Have a decent go at making it work. Maybe you need some clarity around your project process, a more detailed brief, or a different way to manage expectations on both sides. Can it be improved?

Are they making you lose money?

If you’re always working through your margins because they expect so much, the work you’re doing is only going to end up costing you more than you make.

If they’re someone you only do ad-hoc work with then it’s easier to get rid because you can just say you no longer have the time to service smaller projects, but if they’re on a big retainer it can be hard to accept the loss of that money, but in reality, when you work out the hours you’re putting into their account - are you making much?

Think about: If you’re putting in 50 hours to a 30-hour project, you’re going to very quickly be running at a loss with them. The time you get back can be used to find work that doesn’t have such a low margin. That is, of course, so long as they’re the reason for the hours running up, and not because you’re working at a snail's pace or producing work that’s off the brief.

Is it a you-shaped problem?

Do you not like working with someone because they challenge you on things you create? This one can go either way, because if they’re always trying to change the work you do for them then it’s likely you’re not the right person for their job, in which case, you should part ways and they can find someone who is.

But you might also be letting your ego get in the way of what the client wants and what you think is best. If you think what’s best isn’t what they’re suggesting, communicate your reasons why. Explain why you think what you’re producing is bang on the money and why you did it this way.

Think about: A client isn’t an idiot just because they didn’t love your proposal or work, maybe you’re the idiot for not listening to what the direction was that you needed to take with it. But then again, maybe they are an idiot for not listening to someone who knows best at what they do - there’s a fine line.

How to chop a client, tactfully ✂️

We found these online and jazzed them up a bit. Don’t come for us if you use any and it goes horribly wrong.

👉 Don’t lie.

You can stretch the truth by saying things like, “We’ve really enjoyed working with you but…” even though you threw darts at their photo, but don’t lie about the reason. It can come back to bite you later, as most lies do.

Be straight up and explain your reasoning if you’re confident enough, otherwise, just explain you won’t be continuing and trust that being vague will go well.

👉 Don’t be a jerk.

When I say don’t lie, it doesn’t mean you have to tell them that everyone on your team hates their guts. Sugar-coat things a bit. You can say things like, “It feels like we haven’t been able to find a way to work together that is beneficial for both sides.”

By both sides you can 100% mean your side, but they don’t need to know that. There’s no reason to be rude, it probably won’t make you feel as good as you think it will.

👉 Don’t just email.

You can send them an email but make sure you also have a chat with them on the phone. It’s more professional, you’ll be sure to get the tone right (not a really angry one), and there's a better chance to minimise any hard feelings.

Ok, maybe if they’ve been really hideous and rude then you can probably ignore this one and just email them. Decide if the relationship is worth enough to keep amicable.

👉 Don’t leave them in the lurch.

Finish up whatever deliverable you’re working on, package up their files and have them ready to hand over (as long as the client is all paid up, of course). Recommend another agency or consultant who might be a better fit for their needs.

Ghosting and ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. They’ll see you posting on LinkedIn and they’ll know you’re still alive, so just rip off the plaster and get it done. The sooner you do, the sooner they’ll stop being a problem.

👉 Don’t get into a he/she/they said.

Take the high road and don’t get into the weeds of specific situations unless it is absolutely necessary.

If they’ve treated you terribly or upset one of your team, stick it to them. But if it’s just a clash of ways of working, let it be professional.

Homework ✍️

Spend some time this week identifying the clients you least like working with.

Do they share characteristics?

How much of your time do they take up?

Are you imminently going to do a Britney and full shave if you get another condescending email from them?

Or simply increase your price so it becomes “worth it” for the time you’re putting into the account and the internal screams you’re doing on the daily, or have it be their own fault for not wanting to pay more - or just politely sack them off.

Episode six is here next week, and we’ve got some decent pointers and opinions from all our creators.

It’ll definitely give you something to think about. Maybe even put you off being in business altogether.

But as always, chuck any of your questions in Slack and we’ll answer them all either on there, in a newsletter, or on the episode after next.

Let us know how sacking everyone who pays your bills goes.

See you next Tuesday.

VAMO 📺

Over the last few weeks we’ve covered: 👇

💭 Why your business should be on YouTube and how to get started

💭 Getting a call back from an out of office decision-maker

💭 How to write cold emails people can’t ignore

💭 Creating better content by deciding who you’re not posting for and defining your target enemy

📺 And episode 5 is here. On it, Mike, Dan, and several guests give their views on all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month. There’s a bit of disagreement in this one, but that’s what happens when you’ve got a marketer and a salesman in a room together. 👀

As we always say, you don’t need to put into action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid. 

Paid, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

Episode 5 📺

💭 Why your business should be on YouTube - final thoughts:

❝ Comment from the community: 

Took on the Youtube channel and even hired someone from Fiverr to help change up video titles and getting their view on the channel as a whole

Looks a lot better and also the welcome video is 🔥

I just joined the YouTube partner program a month ago and it’s now generating around £100 a month in revenue, which is epic.

👉 YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and it’s owned by the first, Google.

And the most searched word on Google is YouTube.

That should be enough of a reason to want your business on there, but not everyone has the knowledge (or enough motivation) to start posting decent enough video content that people will want to watch, and sometimes the thought of a new platform strategy can make the whole process off-putting enough to not bother. 

It’s great for brand awareness and discovery, and it won’t cost you anything to get going nor will you need an agency to do it for you. 

Plus any videos that rank on YouTube have the potential to rank on Google, so it’s great for SEO. 

Over the last few weeks, some of our private community have been giving YT a go. 🎯

We spoke with a few YouTube creators to get their views on the platform - if it’s really a space that works for everyone and how to get started for people who wanted to give it a try. 

Here’s what Paddy Galloway (a YouTube consultant with over 12 years of experience who helps build the world’s biggest channels, worked on videos with a combined 1 billion views, and has a personal channel of 360k+ subscribers) said 💭

When it comes to deciding what kind of content you’re going to put out on YT, it makes sense for business owners to be creating search-based content.

Content creators who make videos for the platform (vloggers etc) and build a YouTube business are better off posting browser suggested content - the videos on your home page and the suggested feed beside the video you’re watching.

Those videos are based on your viewing interests and frequently visited channels, usually on interesting or evergreen topics that can appear to anyone at any time.

Whereas search-based content is just that. Content you search to find. 

The search algorithm on YouTube is much more focused on relevancy and how targeted a video is to what you’ve searched.

Say you’re someone looking for free help and advice about accounting and want to hear someone sit and talk through it quickly, rather than scour pages of Google, searching on YouTube ‘how to do my taxes’ is a pretty good place to start, and you’re going to want to be one of those people who get seen. 

Niche down and trust the algorithm will bring the right people to you with your work on tags and titles. 

Paddy’s accountant’s main source of income and leads come through YouTube. 

Not Google, Facebook, or word of mouth - YouTube. 

For that, you’d expect he had a big channel, but he has around 1000 subscribers he’s built up over time and the answers to very specific search queries which bring the audience to him, which works.

❝With business content, you don’t need big viewership to justify doing it. 

If you want the full newsletter and you’re keen to start a channel, you can read the full newsletter here 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Do this if you want leads from YouTube. 👀

👋 This week: 💭 Why your business should be on YouTube 💭 How to get started 💭 Tips from Paddy Galloway and Josh Gudgeon 💭 What to post on your channel As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 4 likes

We also chat over the advice from the YouTubers and channel consultants in episode 5. 📺

💭 Getting a call back from an oOo decision-maker - final thoughts:

❝ Comment from the community: 

So I tried the cold call and acted like I belonged. Result. The hiring manager sent me a text last night at 7 30 pm and today called me and I've got a call booked in to take a job on... Will be at least 7k fee. Woo defo doing this more.

👉 Gatekeepers will put cold calls through if the salesman doesn't sound like one.

We had a few of you say recently that you’re struggling to get through to anyone because the gatekeeper isn’t able to transfer you through to the decision-maker. 

Makes sense, the majority still spend a lot of time working from home or out of the office and are hard to get in contact with - if you don't have a direct mobile number for them, all you've got is the office number. 

So we had a chat with Callum Beecroft about how you can do that.

People hire Callum when they need someone to pick up the phone and prospect for new business and they’re not able to do it themselves. 

He’s a freelance SDR who knows a bunch of ways to get through to the person he needs to and to secure an appointment with his client’s target clients. 

Anyone who’s ever made a sales call knows that when you leave your number, you’re probably not getting a callback, unless you’re a really good salesperson. 

That’s because the gatekeeper has two functions:

👉 1. Never put through the wrong call. 

👉 2. Always put through the right call. 

A couple of things Calum says to bear in mind:

You want to sound like you belong. So you need to sound like the person you're trying to get hold of. 

Now if that's a CEO or an MD then typically they're going to be direct, to the point, and they're also very busy. 

Now the second thing to bear in mind is that you don't want to give too much information away. 

All you want to give away is your name and your number, any more than that and the decision-maker is probably going to look at it and think “I know I don't know this person, so I'm not going to call them back”. 

You get those two things right and you should have some success with this.

We broke down the conversation principles in the full newsletter with some more tips on how to get through. 

👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Stop wasting your time befriending the gatekeeper. 📞

👋 This week: 💭 Getting a call back from an out of office decision-maker 💭 Tips from Callum Beecroft and Benjamin Dennehy As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments

This one caused a bit of disagreement in episode 5. 

Dan’s a marketer and Mike’s a salesman. Based on that alone, we’re bound to get conflict in views at some point. 

Mike agrees with the points Callum makes and knows the value of a cold call to his previous business. 

Dan would put the phone down on someone if they tried it on him. 

WWYD?

Comment and let us know. 

Leave a comment

💭 Writing cold emails that people can’t ignore - final thoughts: 

❝ Comment from the community: 

This (the below template) sounded like me about a year ago. Major cringe.

If you ever write cold sales emails without any guidance then you know you’re unlikely to get a reply. 

❝You offend more people by sending boring, formulaic emails. That’s more insulting – you’re not even trying at that point.

But you need to be able to open up your own opportunities for your business and know that if inbound leads dry up, you can go out there and win over a new client. 

You’ll have received sales emails before. How many have actually stood out to you?

They usually all sound the same and follow the same pattern. 👇

Hi, I’m so and so. 

I work for a business that can do XYZ for you and we’re so great! 

We’ve worked with X and we’re the best ever at Y. 

Do you have this problem?

I’d love to be able to talk to you about what it is we do that is so great and hopefully you can apply it to your own business. 

Can we book a call?

Kind regards

Person who didn’t read the room

It’s painful to read, isn’t it?

There are a few things people get wrong when it comes to their cold emailing. We go into them in detail in the full newsletter, but here’s an overview:

👉 Ego ego ego. 

👉 They try to impress and persuade with jargon. 

👉 They’re presumptuous. 

👉The rhythm of the email is boring and there’s no story.

We studied a famed cold sales email, along with years of writing cold copy ourselves, and have a pretty decent hit rate now for getting a reply. 

The things to focus on:

👉 Impact (disarm and get their attention).

👉 Communication (introduce yourself and why you’re in their inbox).

👉 Persuasion (tell them what you’re trying to achieve in the least hard-sell way as you find possible).

You need to stop trying to persuade people to do things before you’ve got their attention. 

It’s like telling someone to make your dinner before you’ve softened them up to the thought of it.

Why would they do that just because you want them to?  

You don’t go in all guns blazing to tell them it’s their turn. You need to counter it and you need to make a compelling argument as to why they should make it, and what’s in it for them. 

❝Tom, I’m about to ask you something you won’t want to do. But you made such a nice cobbler last week, how about you make the dinner tonight and I’ll do the washing up?

Tom’s way more likely to say yes than if you went in with 👇

❝Tom, I’m hungry. I’d love for you to make me dinner, what time will you start cooking?

The dinner here is the meeting you’re trying to bag, if that wasn’t clear. 

How to do it yourself👇

👉 Step one: Make an impact - disarm them and get their attention.

The only job of this email is to get someone to have a meeting with you. To make them think that 30 minutes of their time with you isn’t going to be a total bore and they’re going to get some value from it. You don’t need to give every single detail on you and your service at the very beginning. Warm them up a little first, disarm them. 

Most cold approaches go wrong because you nip right in with persuasion.

The person you’re sending that to will get endless emails that all look exactly like that. What makes yours any different?

The way people speak about their business and product leads consumers to instinctively believe that most marketing messages are exaggerated. Because they are. 

We then make the problem worse by claiming our services and products are the solutions to every problem someone could have when in reality they’re not. And by making those claims, even when they might be true, it makes them sound less believable. People dismiss and ignore things they don’t believe.

So people will read the first line of hyperbole in your email and will dismiss it. 

The best way to make an impact is with disarming honesty. 

“Tom, I’m about to ask you something you won’t want to do.”

By being completely honest (something people trying to secure a sale won’t often do) you’re already setting yourself apart from the majority in their inbox. 

It’s hard to be annoyed at someone if they’re open and honest with their intentions, especially if they do it with humour. 

✍️ Example:

Hi Mike, 

I found your email on LinkedIn. 

I’m sure it was followed by a line saying no cold pitches but by the time I’d processed that I’d already clicked CTRL C and was half way to clicking send, and now I’m here.

💭 Why it works: 

You’re being truthful and you’re not sugarcoating why you’re there, trying to persuade people straight away that they need your services. As we said, it’s hard to be annoyed at someone for cold pitching if they’re honest. 

If you want to read steps two and three along with the template examples, plus some extra tips, it’s all here:

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Write cold emails people can't ignore. 📧

👋 This week: 💭 Things people get wrong in cold email approaches 💭 How to write emails people can’t ignore As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes

💭 Creating better content and defining your target enemy - final thoughts: 

❝ Comment from the community: 

I’ve never thought about flipping it and I’ve always struggled to get past the basics of who I’m targeting so I’ve just ignored it and hoped for the best 😂 

Mike 👇

❝I used to say to myself "take money out of the equation, would you want to work with this person?" and if the answer was no, or you had a niggling feeling before hand, then go with your gut. 

Not all money is good money and not all customers are created equal, so if you can identify a particular person you've had problems with and the red flags they've got - it saves a lot of hassle, back and forth, anger.

If you proceed knowing it's not right, you'll often resent them further down the line. So be clear on who you don't want to work with or a group/idea/mindset of who you wouldn't want to work with too.

Kelsall, ep 2 👇

❝People go on about target audiences being really important. I think you should go one step further and identify your target enemy, and I think everyone should have one. 

Mine’s generally old white blokes, which is ironic because I will one day be an old while bloke, but when I write a piece of content I don’t just ask myself if it’s speaking to my target audience, I ask myself if it’s going to piss those guys off as well.

👉 You might have spent two hours five years ago trying to decide who you think your ‘ideal client’ is because everyone told you that’s what you do when you start a business. 

That’s great.

You need to know who you’re selling to and be sure the content you’re putting out reaches the right people so it doesn’t waste the time you’re spending to create it, and if you’re putting spend behind targeting, that it’s not wasting your cash.

You can go on Google and copy off the first ‘your ideal client’ sheet you find, but most will still leave you with a very vague idea of how you’re going to go about targeting them.

You’re an accountant and you’ve established that your avatar has 3 dogs, lives in a pretty big house on the outskirts of a city, and spends their weekends in the park. 💸

Brilliant, what are you going to do with that? Head to the park and hold up a “Free tax advice if you have a dog” sign? Sure it might work, but it’s not a long-term solution that’ll work for all platforms.

It’s hard to dig deep into buying patterns when you only have surface-level information about people. Yes, you can create a campaign around those few things, but is it going to be niche enough to get the ongoing results you want? Probably not.

In last week’s newsletter, we dropped how we identify our target enemy. 

It’s how you create an anti-target client that you can use to get a better understanding of the people who don’t fit into the category of your best customers, and by default, understand who you do need even more.

Your marketing team (or you) will be able to define their messaging while your sales team (also might just be you) can start to give examples of prospects that should be taken out of your pipeline and will cause you more pain than good.

If you want to read it:

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

Push people away with your marketing. 🎯

👋 This week: 💭 Why an ideal client isn’t enough 💭 How to identify your target enemy 💭 Create better content by deciding who you’re not posting for As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing a…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes

As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode five are, or you can do so in the comments. 👇

Leave a comment

If you’ve not joined the Slack yet, the link is in your paid subscription welcome email. Send us a DM or email if you’re having trouble with it. 🔗

And if you’re not in the private community and want a bit more info on it, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.

VAMO_ 📺

Subscribe now

Over the last 4 weeks we’ve covered: 👇

💭 Growing a Twitter following

💭 Hashtags and using them to build your own community

💭 The email we used to close sales

💭 Why your landing pages aren’t converting

📺 And episode 4 is here. On it, Mike, Dan, and several guests give their views on all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month.

As we always say, you don’t need to put into action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid. 

Paid, if you want to head on over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

EPISODE FOUR

Twitter for business –  final thoughts. 

👇 What our community said.

I added 53 new followers yday so it's definitely working. 

My latest Tweet series getting crazy engagement. A few hundred followers came in off the back of this engagement, which is big for me, I'm not really a Twitter guy.

👉 Over the last month, Mike and a handful of people in the private community have been following a proven process to grow their Twitter followings. 

All organic with no spend behind it. 

Mike for the reason that he lost his LinkedIn profile (which after a long year is now back, cheers everyone 🍻) and it seemed like the next best platform for relatively honest and uncensored conversations about business.

Platform risk is something that anyone who relies on one or more channels for the leads will face, but there will hopefully always be another route you can jump on quickly. 

What we do at VAMO works on Twitter, it’s where most of the top Substacks have grown and it makes sense for us to be on there, that said, personal pages are almost always easier to grow than a business one when the business has little awareness. So we use the brand page for daily updates, and Mike’s to drive people to it. 

You trust people a lot quicker when you can see who you’re talking to, so it makes sense.

Some businesses may consider it out of their niche, but with almost 400 million users, you’re probably just not sure where to find them on there or how to talk to them properly. 👀

What you want to use your Twitter for and how you target your customers depends on where you’re at with your marketing strategy. 

There’s no denying it’s a great place to build brand awareness, but some people still need a push on why that’s necessary and struggle to see past instant ROI. 

💰 Mike is way more centred around VAMO on his profile but speaks occasionally about IAM, his video and animation business. He’s closed a couple of deals this month on Twitter and made several thousand in revenue for that business, and we get regular new sign-ups too for VIEWS, so it’s not a bad return.

If you’re a relatively new business or start-up, your end goal should probably be to build a niche community for your brand. It’ll work as a good foundation for creating an engaged audience and a way for new people to trust what you do.

It’ll take time to get going and like we mentioned earlier, time isn’t usually an investment people want to make when they’re looking for a quick ROI.

Often, the problem with businesses on Twitter is first that they struggle to ditch the professional jargon and speak to people how they engage with, and second, they’re limited to sharing things that have been checked off by 5 layers of management and are all very surface level – stuff like, ‘This is us and this is our product, it’s great, buy it” or poor attempts at jumping on a trend from two weeks ago.

Then they see no attributed ROI and write it off. 

The good thing for you guys is that you’re probably either a one-person band or a small business, so you don’t have the hoops to jump through and can crack out anything you think will work. 

Organic Twitter works. You’ve just got to be interesting and give value. 

Ah, give value, one of those really boring and overly pushed messages in marketing. But it’s true. 

The basic principle. 

1/ A touch base tweet each AM

2/ An educational tweet each PM

3/ A step-by-step thread once weekly

4/ Engage with 5 people in my niche each day

If you want to see, in detail, the format we followed and examples of how Mike put it into practice then you can by clicking the green button below.

There’s been a lot of chat in the Slack about it and how everyone’s getting on, so you might get some ideas.👇

JOIN THE PRIVATE COMMUNITY

You’ll also be able to go over and watch the full episode 📺 to hear our opinions on the whole process, plus see the last 3 months of content that we’ve shared.

Hashtags for growth - final thoughts. 

👇 What our community said.

Love the newsletter this week - I have never understood the use of hashtags on LinkedIn. So many people say "don't use more than three hashtags in a post". I've very rarely used any of them unless I'm doing it ironically like Vic Edwards and his ninety character ones. #whatsthepointofhashtagstheydontworkonlinkedin style.

I like the idea of using them to build a community off the back of an event or campaign though. Will keep that in mind for future marketing campaigns!

Newsletters great! I've read so many different things around hashtags online.. good to know, i defo am that person that just uses them as extra words or to hashtag how I feel.  Thanks guys.

👉 Are hashtags any use at all in 2022?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Only if you’re smart with them.

Dan’s answer in the episode: They’re an excuse to make lazy content. 

An even longer answer: So as long as you’re not just using the most popular hashtags (they’re oversaturated and you’ll drown in them), and platform dependant, they’re still a pretty good way to engage new people and an even better way to cultivate a community.

Algorithms will continuously change and really, none of us will ever understand them beyond the obvious, but the basics of finding content through hashtags probably won’t stop any time soon. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The way Instagram shows you content now means that what they serve you on both your home and explore page is more relevant and targeted than ever. Unfortunately for people relying on hashtags, fewer people use them to go and seek out content they’re interested in - why would you when you are shown it anyway?

Great for the user, shit for someone hoping for an easy win. 

On Twitter, the OG hashtag platform, hashtags still play a massive part in the way people engage with one another, but now it’s more to keep tabs on UGC (user-generated content) and brand campaigns than anything else.

Twitter hashtags are a great way to bring a community together and keep content in one place, and by default, grow your audience. 

Vicki Ross has grown a strong community using her hashtag #CopywritersUnite, it’s a great example of a niche community with a regular and engaged audience who share tips, thoughts and ask questions through the tag. She gave us a little more insight in episode 4.

We go over IG, Twitter, and Linkedin in more detail with some examples in our full newsletter here.

Close the file - final thoughts.

👇 What our community said.

Used it yday. Had a call just now. Signing off £13k of work next week with another £16k to follow.

Used the email at the end of last week, got two immediate replies. Meetings booked for next week, thanks guys!

So I emailed 4 prospects yesterday morning using the email letter prod and two signed off yesterday. Seems so simple but hadn't thought of being that direct. Thanks VAMO team - I owe you all a 🍺 for that tip!

Just used it. Will definitely post how it went…. Only went at worked. Closed on a years worth of work today.

👉 There’s a huge amount of research that shows when you attempt to cut ties with your prospect and focus your energy on the ones who are invested in what you do, it can significantly improve your conversion rates.

High-performing organisations that focus on prioritisation generally add half as many prospects to their pipeline but win at least twice as many.

There’s no point getting hung up on one who has, after a couple of promising conversations, decided they’re going to drop off the face of the earth.

Breaking up means you can move on.

⌛️ You’ll save wasted time. By disqualifying a prospect, you can focus on the leads that are more likely to close in a sale.

🙌 You’ll clear your pipeline: We all want a realistic view of our pipelines, this way you’ll get rid of any loose ends.

📧 You’ll improve your response rate: In an ideal world, the close the file email will trigger a response. They’ll see you’re off to help someone else and know you’re not going to keep trying.

We had Benjamin D (The UK’s most hated sales trainer) do a bit for our community this month.

In episode 4 he speaks through how he words his close the file email and why his clients find it works so well.

We gave his version of the email and some extra info to the community in this tagged newsletter, and it got great results. Either financial, or some responses saying they weren’t interested so you could give up the ghost and instead focus on bringing in new business. 💰

A good salesperson knows when to walk away.

If you want to see the full thing, you’ll see what’s worked so well for our community and you’ll be able to join the Slack and ask any questions about it if you have any. 👇

VIEWS ARE MY OWN

How to close the file with your prospect. 👋

👋 This week is an easy one 👇 ✍️ Why prospects ghost you 💭 One final email you can use to close the file and move on As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit…

Read more

4 years ago · 4 likes · Mollie Adams

Landing page improvements - final thoughts. 

The private community got a clip last week from the unreleased episode to watch with this newsletter, and if you missed it, you can see it at the end of ep 4 alongside other questions you all asked in our Slack. 

What are the team’s thoughts on good landing pages?

I feel like what we have with pain at the top, testimonials, and CTA with offer is kind of dull and like everyone else.

👆 We had this question thrown into the ask Mike and Dan channel in our slack this month.

There are only so many variables you can change on a landing page. A landing page is designed for you to capture info or make a sale quickly. If you’re bombarding them with a load of information you’re probably not articulating the benefits well enough in a way that sells.

If you think it’s dull, it’s likely that the copy and campaign are dull.

A good landing page will make you complete the CTA without scrolling.

In short, the big reasons we gave that you’re probably finding it difficult to convert:

👉 It’s not clear.

👉 You’re giving them too much to do.

👉 The copy is boring and doesn’t match the content.

In the words of Dan Kelsall, ❝Less is more. Stop fucking giving them 15 things to download.

It’s less about trying to be smart and trying to stand out, you’ve got their attention on the ad or content to get them on the landing page, and more about the words you use to convert them and not wasting their time.

*All the copywriters reading nod in unison*

The landing page needs as much effort put into the copy as the content and creative that sends people to it.

Don’t think that because you’ve got them there that you’ve done the hard work. It’s easier for someone to click off than it is to follow through with the CTA if it’s not giving what it needs to.

Here was a thread we found that had some examples of decent landing pages that we put in the community last week 👇

Again, you can read the full newsletter here.

As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode four are.

If you’ve not joined it yet, the link is in your paid subscription welcome email. 🔗

And if you’re not in the private community and want a bit more info on it, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.

Anyone who wants to head over and watch ep 4, you can find it in the new episodes section on the nav bar at the top of the website. It looks like that. 👇

VAMO_ 📺

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🔗 Marketing funnels

👀 How to harness your creativity

✍️ Ideas for starting TOFU content

👏 Where to find what your target audience wants to know

💭 Free courses to put yourself through

💡 Answers to some of the community questions

🧩 Some decent browser extensions and websites to make your life easier

Our logic is if you do just one of these things every week, over the course of a year, you’ll have done 52 extra things to make your business less shit. 

We’re changing up the format of the episodes and newsletters and will be updating the community about it in #announcements.

It’ll make it easier for you to action a load of ways to improve your following, sales, and marketing every week. 🙌

A quick run down of some of the content you’ll have missed over the last few weeks:

It’s easy to get stuck in doing the same old things. ✍️ 

We fail at being creative because we get so used to thinking patterns that get in the way of new ideas.

1. Selective thinking.

It makes us choose the safe bets. The ones we’ve done seen and done before. We favour certain ideas over others, and we become blind to anything that contradicts them.

Both leave us convinced that we know what is and what isn’t a good idea before we’ve even tried it or put it out into the ether. This isn’t just bad for creativity, it’s bad for business, too.

1. Reactive thinking.

This is what makes people quick to push an idea out and do so without much of a thought process. Who is it targeting, what is it trying to achieve, and will it do that? It’s not the worst way to be, you want to stay reactive to things to be on current trends, but you want to do so with some logic behind it.

You don’t always want to be the first out the door. Beating other people to be reactive isn’t always the winning idea. You only allow other companies to watch, learn, and eventually enter a ready market with something superior.

1. Assumptive thinking. 

It’s normal to base decisions and ideas on knowledge or past experiences.

But this stops us from taking in new information and trying other ways of doing things - the two main drivers of creativity.

💭 Coming up with ideas takes a lot of back and forth. But there’s no better way to decide if it’s worth pushing further or not than by just doing.

You can use the below as a guide for executing a new idea if you’re a bit stuck.👇

Idea – what’s the basis of what you want to achieve?

Metric – how will you measure the outcome of it?

Goal – what do you want to get from it?

Timeline – the duration to accomplish the idea, make sure you give yourself something to work towards or you’ll just let things drop.

For example:

I will create an (A/B ad test) to increase (the number of email sign ups on a landing page) by (10 times) within (one month) from whatever start date.

Always make sure you note down:

What’s in it for your audience? If they don’t get any value then neither will you.

Can I do this well? Is it within my remit? Will it absolutely flop without 3rd party help? Can I afford 3rd party help or is there something I can change to make it more manageable to do myself?

What can I action right now? Is there a smaller version of your idea you can push somewhere (socials, website, emails) to get some feedback and refine your idea?

Plus the VAMO creative process was written down and memorialised forever. 📺

Here are a few of the main platform free courses you might find useful that we mentioned if you’re new to the world of social media marketing or on a limited budget to start with.👇

👉 Facebook Blueprint

The FB courses platform has a load of free material for you to start doing more.

No budget to hire a freelancer or agency to start doing FB ads? Learn it for yourself and start putting it into practice to retarget your customers and keep your business or brand in the back of their minds.

👉 Hubspot Academy

Loads of free courses on social strategy, building websites, email marketing, content marketing, web optimisation, operations, and a bajillion other topics.

👉 Skillshop by Google

Cover everything about Google ads and analytics.

❝Master the Google tools you use at work with free online training. Develop skills you can apply right away, with e-learning courses designed by Google product experts. Learn at your own pace and get Google product certified.

2 of the questions to the team 💡

When you're bootstrapping a business, how important is it to have a business plan from the start?

I say a business plan is less important than a defined end goal.

That's the most important thing. You can work backward from that and then create your plan. I'll share some stuff on this moving forward. But, if you don't know where to go and what time you’re meant to arrive there... you can't really plan your journey.

You can spend all day writing a business plan. Same as a marketing plan, but what you’re doing in 2 years’ time won’t look anything like the plan you spent hours on at the start.

Backward plan from a clear objective. That's the key.

Mine was "I want to sell Learning Heroes on 1st Jan 2018 for £10,000,000"

Then what I needed to do I worked back from - who might buy it, why, when should I approach them, what would they want to see, number of clients, recurring revenue, how much should I charge, sales targets for year 1, 2 and 3, etc.

That all came AFTER the goal had been defined. 

- Mike.

What do you think of content repurposing, specifically podcast repurposing? Meaning, is it worth the time investment for a shot at higher ROI (if you think there is one)?

You should repurpose content, always. But don't do it for the sake of it and just use anything you’ve got - only repurpose the bits you know are going be decent.

I see loads of companies offer 60 bits of content repurposed from an interview or podcast when intact 50 bits are crap and aren't adding any value. 

So yes repurpose, but it has to be valuable and follow the formula of being what your ideal client is looking for and in the place they look.

- Mike.

👉 NB from Mollie: On the above, Milk Video is a useful bit of tech for repurposing Zoom podcast meetings and other long-form video recordings.

(Mike and Dan would probably disagree because their businesses create video content, but for those without a budget this isn’t a bad place to start with repurposing.)

👉 If this was forwarded to you and you like what you see, subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next send.

VAMO_ 📺