John Jantsch - The Ultimate Marketing Engine: 5 Steps to Ridiculously Consistent Growth

PRAISE FOR THE ULTIMATE MARKETING ENGINE

John shares a remarkable insight: what if you aligned your business around transforming your customers with an unrelenting focus on their success rather than your own?

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT,

bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

The Ultimate Marketing Engine will fundamentally change how you view marketing forever.

JJ VIRGIN,

New York Times bestselling author of The Virgin Diet, Founder, The Mindshare Collaborative

John unlocks the secret to rapid business growth: the customer is not king; the GROWTH of the customer is king. This book is a must-read for entrepreneurs who want to build (or re-build) their business on a foundation of predictable growth.

RYAN DEISS,

author of Invisible Selling Machine

The best teachers and books are the ones that show you how to do it, not do the work for you. That is The Ultimate Marketing Engine.

KARA GOLDIN,

Founder and CEO, Hint, Inc., author of Undaunted

There is one common factor for every successful business: the word spreads. Johns book is the recipe to make exactly that happen.

MIKE MICHALOWICZ,

author of Get Different and Profit First

2021 John Jantsch

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date published. The author and the publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

ISBN 978-1-4002-2478-4 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-2477-7 (PBK)

Epub Edition July 2021 9781400224784

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941320

Printed in the United States of America

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I dedicate this work to all of those amazing entrepreneurs who show up every day, persevere, resolve, commit, learn, teach, fall down, get up, and generally just try to keep this big old goofy world spinning one more day.

Youve taught me so much and delivered joy and professional purpose to my life.

CONTENTS:

Can there not be government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I t was about 8:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time on a Wednesday when I received a text from a customer in the Midwest. I know a lot of businesspeople get late-night and even weekend texts and phone calls from customers, but I had never received one from Charlie, so this was kind of a big deal.

His text contained a long draft of an email he planned to send the next morning to his list of clients and a slightly altered version meant for his team of about fifty employees. I had provided marketing strategy and advice for this organization for a number of years. Now Charlie was asking me to weigh in on the content and timing of his proposed email.

The tone of the note was somber. The news, plain and simple, was something nobody wants to hear: that morning, Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas announced the first of its kind shelter-in-place order, essentially a total lockdown on all but essential businesses.

Of course, this phenomenon was occurring all over the world due to the global pandemic of 2020. But addressing it at that moment presented unfamiliar ground for the millions of small businesses and individuals facing it.

That same day, the NBA paused its season, the World Health Organization declared the disease a global pandemic, the Dow fell 1,465 points, and beloved actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced that they had tested positive for the virus.

Charlies home remodeling company had decided to reach out and communicate that they felt the best course of action was to halt all projects immediately and follow all precautionary measures in an effort to be prudent in the face of so many unknowns.

The potential cost of shutting down the business was huge, but as the lyrics of the popular song by The Fray suggest, Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.

After making a few alterations to Charlies proposed memo in an effort to lighten the tone just a bit, we agreed that the message would go out first thing Monday morning.

At the same time, millions and millions of small business owners were contemplating their fate and attempting to chart a course of action. Livelihoods were at stake. Making tough decisions, even when they are logical decisions, is hard for a business owner in the best of times. Suddenly it got a lot harder.

As we know now, many small businesses were wiped out by the effects of the pandemic, often through no fault of their own. Yet, many survived, rebuilt, and even thrived.

While some industries were no match for COVID-19, the pandemic also exposed a fundamental and often forgotten truth about business: in good times, growth often comes from being in the right place at the right time; in tough times, growth comes from being important in some meaningful way in the lives of your customers.

The local bakery is important because it provides a place of warmth, the promise of sustenance, and the smell of baking bread. The local accountant is important because only she can reassure her clients that things are going to be okay. Not perfect, but okay.

A business is important to its customers when those customers realize that their lives would be diminished were the business to cease to exist.

When Monday morning arrived, Charlie hit the send button. Within moments, replies rolled in from employees and current and past customers. Employees, many of whom were dealing with their own personal sense of uncertainty, supported the move. Customers also overwhelmingly supported the difficult decision and applauded the owners for making it.

Beyond assurances of loyalty, customers expressed concern for the organization as a whole. Some vowed to do whatever they could to support the business. Not a single project, even those that had now come to a sudden halt, was cancelled.

Eventually, as some semblance of normalcy returned, the organization found its way back to serving its customers. The backlog of projects from the ones who stuck with them made up for the months of standing by.

This small business had built a marketing engine that provided an understanding of what success looked like to their ideal customers. That understanding helped them instinctively choose a moment of complete uncertainty to get even closer to their customers when it mattered most.

The lesson here is that doing what seems like the right thing during a rough patch is always the right thing from a marketing perspective.