Key Strategies for Positioning Your Law Firm for Growth with Doug Reifschneider

Doug (00:01.269)
Hi, my name is Doug Reifschneider. I’m a fractional chief marketing officer, known as a CMO with Chief Outsiders. Chief Outsiders is the largest fractional CMO firm in the country. We’ve got about 110 plus CMOs. We also offer chief sales officers as an option. Myself, I grew up in the restaurant industry, so I’m very knowledgeable about multi-unit brick and mortar marketing for all kinds of businesses and franchising, et cetera, and happy to be here today.

Karin (00:30.262)
Thank you so much, Doug. We talked for a minute about chief fractional CMOs, and we, I think, will sprinkle that throughout our conversation, because it’s something that’s really popped up in the last few years that people are doing more and more. It makes so much sense. And I actually see law firms even doing this, doing kind of fractional services as well, fractional CEO, fractional whatever.

Doug (00:55.597)
Okay. Yes.

Karin (00:58.45)
And it makes so much sense. I think it comes back to my days of working hourly, way back, you know, like fresh out of college and realizing how backwards that felt. So for people who are good at what they do, working hourly punishes you. You end up like kind of getting more and more expertise, getting faster and better at what you do. And then you’re basically making less money for your hourly work.

So for fractional work, you are getting paid for what you’re doing. And we have this service as well. We call it our marketing co-counsel plan and where we set up a whole year of strategy and we’re gonna dig into that. So today we are, the title of the show is Key Strategies to Position Your Law Firm for Growth. So we’re gonna talk about strategies, positioning, growth. It all comes back to the marketing funnel.

So that’s kind of a big intro. So sorry for going on for so long. But let’s talk about how you get started with this whole idea of sitting down and doing kind of a big marketing strategy. Let’s say you’ve got a new client. Where do you start?

Doug (01:56.592)
Right?

Doug (02:17.185)
if we’re actually brought in for that type of an engagement. We start out with the concept that our company is based on and it’s in a book called the Growth Gears. The Growth Gears are a simplified approach to how when you start trying to figure out strategy and positioning or whatnot you have to understand your customer. That’s the first C. You need to understand the competition because what are they doing? What’s their messaging look like? How are they positioned? You need to also understand your company.

Because when a company understands their vision or they have like written vision mission and core values That’s golden. Sometimes we go into engagements where that’s not there and we have to start at that spot too So once you understand your company You know what kind of what your competition is doing both from an advertising perspective a messaging perspective all that sort of thing and you understand Those how they go together that starts to set you up for a growth gear number two, which is strategy

So the strategy is where you start to actually work on that positioning. As an example, when you’re working on marketing strategy, the whole point about marketing is getting the right product to the right customer at the right price at the right time and the right place in some cases in locational businesses. And to figure that out and to really make it work, you’ve got to have a very unique proposition. Like you can’t be like everybody else. Like there’s a

Karin (03:38.162)
Yes.

Doug (03:39.357)
There’s a concept out there with EOS. I don’t know if you’re familiar with entrepreneurial operating system, they help small businesses operate more professionally. And one of the things they do is they make you in the series of workshops come up with three uniques. And I can’t tell you how often most companies go, our people is our unique. All right. That doesn’t mean, in some cases it’s true, but I’ll give you a…

Karin (03:44.563)
No, what is that?

Karin (03:55.82)
Okay.

Karin (04:01.622)
Yeah.

Doug (04:08.149)
An exaggerated case of where that’s true if you’re running if you’ve started a security firm and you run personal security for Celebrities people with money whatever the case may be and you’ve gone out and you’ve hired a bunch of ex Operators from the military, you know seal team Delta for stuff like that You people really means you’re gonna probably provide this great service Now if your competition is John Bubba from Athens, Georgia, and he hired all his football player friends as security. There are people

while big and strong may not have all the other expertise to be a great security firm. So that’s where their people in situation one is better than situation two. So the point of that.

Karin (04:44.802)
Sure. But isn’t that risky to have your people as your main point of differentiation because then as soon as they leave, then what?

Doug (04:55.841)
Also a good point. So one, very often everybody says it is and it’s not. And then two, because there is a flow through in all organizations you’re absolutely right.

Karin (05:04.586)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so people say that it’s their people, it’s probably not. What does that mean that they don’t have a point of differentiation or they just haven’t defined that or what do you usually see?

Doug (05:19.485)
So in the case of attorneys, you know, that’s where people could actually be a point because if the attorneys have chosen one line of work, whether it’s, you know, case law or whatever else, all the different disciplines and lawyers and attorneys, and I don’t know them like you would know them, that’s where that could work if your people actually have that expertise and you can get around that turnover thing that you just discussed.

Karin (05:42.676)
Right, okay.

Doug (05:43.153)
But it’s usually better to be positioned on what you do best for your customers, because at the end of the day, we’ve got another concept that Chief Outsiders called pain and pleasure Island. Customers have a problem. They’re in pain. They’ve got some kind of an issue. There’s a boat you need to get to pleasure Island to where you’ve solved the problem and stop the pain. And that’s what great marketing will do is get you from pain Island to pleasure.

Karin (06:11.65)
So I’ve heard this described also as being a pain killer versus a vitamin. So where vitamins we all know we probably should take them and if we take them, fine, but I don’t necessarily, there’s some that I can kind of feel, but if I miss my vitamin today, it’s not gonna change my day that much. It’s not gonna really impact in an urgent way anything that happens to me today.

But if I am in pain, I want a painkiller and I want it now. And I want it to fix this so that this pain stops intruding on whatever’s happening to me today. So a lot of places are starting out with their messaging as vitamins. Like, you know, we, we are going to strengthen your bones. And people are like, oh, that’s great. But I could do that today or I could do that next year. And I don’t care. Like, you know, I see this a lot with estate planning firms.

I know I need a will, but there’s no sense of urgency. Like if I get the will today, I’m probably gonna be alive next week, so I could do it now. It’s gonna sit at the bottom of my to-do list for probably the next 18 months or more. But if there is a sense of urgency and there’s a pain to it and there’s a solution to alleviating that pain, I feel entirely different about this. I wanna get off that pain island and over to the pleasure island.

instantly. I now am seek urgently seeking a solution and this is not a vitamin anymore. This is something that I have a problem and it’s impacting me. And so I think that’s a really good place to start. And for the record, I didn’t come up with that one. So yeah, absolutely. Of course, I’m borrowing it. But I think in terms of positioning, that’s

Doug (07:57.868)
May I borrow it? I’ve actually not heard that one before. It’s awesome. It’s very great.

Karin (08:06.726)
a real point of differentiation also, where you’re kind of saying the same thing everybody else is and you’re a vitamin and all of that versus I’ve got a solution and it’s urgent. I’m adding this sense of urgency to it and I’m alleviating something that’s really painful. So from the beginning, we can use that as sort of this beginning understanding of positioning and how that changes the way people think about your interaction with them.

So then how do you move people through the overall strategy to get them from this idea of I need marketing to getting them through spending some time with strategy and to the growth outcome that they usually are starting with. Like usually, I’m guessing your clients come in the same way. I need more clients, I need them now. And I think what I need is like,

social media maybe or SEO or they have a guess of what they need in terms of tactics.

Doug (09:11.485)
Great question and what you just described is what we call random acts of marketing. So without, without strategy in place, you tend to do that. So a lot of chief outsiders clients have been in the B2B space and they typically have grown from an entrepreneur started selling widgets, right? Sam Smith sold widgets and he sold a lot of widgets. And then one day his company got big enough. He needed to hire a salesperson to do some sales because he needed to manage the company, all right. Or she doesn’t matter. Um,

Karin (09:16.603)
Oh, I love this.

Doug (09:39.845)
That salesperson does a great job, sells more stuff, they keep selling more widgets, he gets kind of stuck, they hire more salespeople, and then someday they finally meet a plateau, and they start hearing things like, hey, we need a website, or we need a brochure for that conference we’re going to next month. And all that stuff without the insights and strategy we talked before is random acts of marketing without any kind of point. It goes back to the ready shoot aim, and very important to get that in line. So it’s very important to get your positioning right.

Karin (10:08.674)
So tell me more, I see this all the time. And what it sounds like when I first have a conversation with a client is we have a website and it doesn’t do anything. Or we tried, XYZ didn’t do anything. And so it sounds like there’s this sort of religion that everybody believes in and they’re like atheists. You know? And it’s like, exactly.

Doug (10:34.746)
That’s where data comes in.

Karin (10:38.186)
Okay, so how do you get people, no, let me back up and reframe that question. So how do you explain what mistakes they’re making when they come to you and they say those kinds of phrases? Because I know how we say it and I know what’s happening there too, as soon as they say things. I’m like, okay, I know exactly how to diagnose this and why you’re saying that.

Doug (11:01.369)
It varies by client, by industry, but the bottom line is when we go in with most of our assignments or engagements, we go in with that strategy process in mind, you know, inside strategy execution, but we’re looking for quick wins. And the quick wins are going to be, and it’s going to depend on the chief outsider and again, the industry, the experience, but we’re going to check the website, get in the GA4. We might do some website checkers to see if it’s fulfilling PageSpeed Insights and we’ll check the website that way and we’ll look at any other data they may be able to share with us.

and find out if what they’re saying or what they perceive is true, because theoretically perception is reality, they have facts to prove otherwise.

Karin (11:38.902)
Right. So what we will typically also do is we talked about, I was gonna pull this back over to the funnel. And so we kind of talked very broadly about this funnel. And usually people will come in with this very narrow focus on where they think the problem is. And oftentimes that’s not even it. Like they think the problem is the website and the website should just be this like, just engine that just pulls leads out of the ether.

So instead, typically there’s some hole in that, in their overall marketing funnel that is the problem. So let’s talk broadly through kind of what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen mistakes. And we were also talking about that bottom of the funnel before we started recording. And can you talk a little bit about your experience with how you can turn…

things around or make improvements, especially down there. I feel like that is really a missing area that people kind of really forget about or set to the side. And just as a recap, the bottom of the funnel is the post purchase. So they’ve already been a client. You have probably finished their case and been paid. And so as far as you’re considered, oftentimes, as far as a firm is thinking about this client, your work is done.

And but in terms of your marketing, it absolutely is not done. And so, Doug, where do you guys offer suggestions, strategy, input about that bottom area of the funnel?

Doug (13:17.853)
I’m gonna question that customer nurturing in all industries is very, very important. And depending on the lifetime value of a customer and legal circles, I’m not sure how that pans out and I’m sure it varies by discipline because of the dollars involved, et cetera. But it is about following up with your customers while they are like engaging with them, providing, if they’re a current customer and they’re kind of long term.

Providing birthday cards and things like that. Just know that you’re human and that you care. It’s very important because at the end of the day, and this goes with all industries, it’s even the one I came from, experience can be more important than the actual, in my case, food restaurants, in the service for lawyers. What about the experience with a great, that customer walks in the front door, does the receptionist give them a hearty

smiley greeting, you know, welcome to ABC Law. Do they have to wait an hour of their valuable time because somebody thinks they’re too busy to serve them or if they made a 10 o’clock appointment, are they in at 10 o’clock? Things like that. It actually, that’s where some of the marketing that comes on post purchase is more operational driven than marketing driven, but marketing can still drive emails and the Christmas or holiday cards or birthday messages and things like that. And

The whole point is to engage with the customer in a human way and not just be so black and white and drone on about whatever the topic is and whatever the need is.

Karin (14:48.523)
Yes.

Karin (14:56.558)
I think that’s a really good point about how, I think there’s a lot of points in that funnel where your marketing strategy is absolutely tied to your operational systems. And there should be a good amount of automation in your marketing or it’s not gonna happen. Let’s be honest, like we are busy doing the thing that we’re doing all day. We shouldn’t have to, a lot of these things should be automated in order for them to happen on a consistent basis.

And so that post purchase and that repurchase area, we all have heard all these numbers about how many of your current and past clients drive your future business. So that’s not, that’s obvious. That’s not something I need to like recap here, but the process to make that happen should be an automated process. You should have checklists, you should have automations, you could have emails, but like you said, I feel like

Doug (15:36.989)
Hmm.

Karin (15:52.814)
making it feel really human, not just robotic. We worked with you. This issue that you came to our firm for was probably significant if you hired a lawyer for it, whatever it might be, whether it was your business, whether it was your family, whatever that might’ve been. We realized that you don’t wanna hear from a robot. You’re gonna hear from us. You’re gonna know some suggestions about how we might work together in the future. We’re here to understand the broad picture.

of potential risks you might face in the future, whatever that might be, to stay top of mind. So I feel like that’s one area where people are just leaving money on the table.

Doug (16:33.345)
You’re exactly right, because to your point, if you automate that process, you’re a large enough law firm, you’ve used Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever some customer relationship management platforms are, CRMs, they can be very automated. The beauty about AI coming on board is personalizing those messages is going to be easier as time goes on. But if you don’t add some personalization to it in a human way, it will come across too robotic and just too basic.

Doug (17:03.329)
an inbox for, you know, you’ve got a client for a year and you send them a birthday message that birthday message if it’s not personalized in some way is going to come across pretty robotic and you need to be careful with how that happens and how you automate things to your point.

Karin (17:15.125)
Yeah.

Karin (17:18.846)
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so we talked about random acts of marketing, which is also just like shiny object syndrome is our version of that where you just get distracted, you lose focus. So how do you avoid that? How do you make sure that you stay focused or how do you talk to your clients about making sure that they kind of stay in their lane?

Doug (17:44.453)
No. The key to that really is communication. So if we’re in as a true fractional executive, we’re on their executive team. We’re participating in their weekly or biweekly executive meetings. We’ve probably got at least a weekly check-in with the CEO and it’s all about communication and then positioning and those, those conversations, uh, because it is easy for a CEO to go on, go on to the next shiny things and some, I mean, I had it, I had an engagement at one point where I think we were the shiny.

Karin (17:48.863)
Okay.

Doug (18:12.417)
object for a while and then something else came along and we didn’t have as much access to him anymore. I guess you’ve probably run into that a time or two too.

Karin (18:14.557)
Right?

Karin (18:21.99)
Oh yeah, I’ve been doing this long enough. I feel like there are a few experiences, a few situations I haven’t seen. So for me, I feel like a lot of that is driven by them being worried about whether it’s showing the results or that it’s working or whatever, but just kind of being worried. And so how do you kind of bring them back to this idea of the strategy and alleviate that?

concern or worry or fear or whatever so that they recognize what the kind of path and the goals and how do you address, I guess what I’m asking is do you have metrics and reporting or how do you kind of show the value and show the progress and the growth and all of that?

Doug (19:10.525)
Well, yes, because at Chief Outsiders, when we do an engagement, it’s usually, well, it’s always based on deliverables. We don’t base anything on hourly rate for sure. You can kind of, you have to back into that to figure out how much time it’s going to take to finish a deliverable, but you bill accordingly. And so those deliverables will usually have metrics attached to them and whether it’s, you know, let’s say there’s an SEO metric on the website and you want to find out that now with GA4, it’s duration, not.

Karin (19:20.671)
Right.

Doug (19:39.137)
how we measure it with universal analytics, but now it’s how much time they actually spend on a website versus it can off right away? All right, and well now with GA4, it’s all about engagement time, as opposed to landing a website and then go off and the time on is like three seconds, you want it to be three minutes or five minutes, whatever. So you provide, we provide, if we don’t provide those metrics upfront, we do as we get in, because sometimes what we don’t know, we don’t know.

Karin (19:44.81)
Yeah, just overall traffic.

Karin (19:58.452)
Right.

Doug (20:04.805)
But when we build the plan it’s based on deliverables and every deliverable will have some kind of data attached to it Usually sometimes it’ll be subjective. You know, it might be hey, we’re gonna help you Source and hire somebody to replace us when we’re done within six months, right? So that’s like an update on the status of applicants or something, but there is to your point that’s where the weekly check-ins and we usually keep pretty good documentation of how we’re doing there and

There’s some of my counterparts go to some really deep detail that I will say, I don’t necessarily go into that. It’s like make your eyes cross. They’ve got so much detail and how they’ve done things. But the point is we provide updates on those deliverables, which are usually based on the appropriate metrics.

Karin (20:38.388)
Yeah.

Karin (20:46.462)
Okay. All right. So you’ve sat with a, I was going to say a firm, but typically you’ve sat with your client and figured out, do you set up a set of goals based on monthly, quarterly? How do you guys organize that piece of it so that they can kind of know what’s going on, but also not be like on that hamster wheel of like, okay, now this week and that week and you know, how do you…

What’s your, what’s the typical timeframe that you recommend for them to expect results?

Doug (21:21.085)
depends on attack. So SEO is near and dear to my heart because of my multi-unit background. I’m big on local SEO and locations and having your NAP data right and having Google business profiles, all that stuff, right? That takes time, right? That can take three to six months. So you’ve got to try to set that expectation. Some CEOs don’t want to hear it, but that’s the expectation. If you’re going after pay-per-click and you’re going to do that on not, kind of midway through the funnel and you’re trying to do some ads on Google, that’s going to be, at least you can.

Karin (21:33.962)
Yeah.

Karin (21:41.195)
Yeah.

Doug (21:50.033)
report quickly on your cost per click and cost per lead and attach that to the website. See if it’s actually creating demand generation or lead generation and put numbers to that. And every other thing works that way.

Karin (21:59.882)
Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I think that’s really important also to realize that all these different parts are going to take different amounts of time. So if you’re doing some local SEO, this might take this amount of time and then your email marketing. If you’re sending an email newsletter to a bunch of past clients, that might take a week and all of a sudden you’ve got some results. All of a sudden, if it’s really well done, that could be a pretty nearly instant result if you’re just…

Doug (22:12.989)
Yes.

Karin (22:33.758)
if you’ve got a very clean, well done offer. So, and that’s correct. And that’s the right way of doing it because that’s the whole point of the funnel where you’ve got things kind of moving throughout and you should have clients at all different stages of that funnel. So we keep talking about the funnel and I’m gonna keep doing that this whole year. But I just want people to, yeah, please.

Doug (22:52.689)
Well, and if I may, I may back up a little bit to your point when people are looking at those random acts of marketing we talked about before. It’s like, should I do this or should I do that? Nowadays, there’s so much going on. If you’ve got a well-orchestrated marketing engine, the answer probably is yes, depending on where that tactic fits on in the funnel. And it should be going on all the time because it’s not like, hey, we do no marketing and now we’re gonna do pay-per-click and that’s all you do, you’re gonna fail.

If you, if you only do SEO, you’re going to fail. You need to do all of this nowadays in a digital world. And it’s got to be orchestrated to fit in the funnel that you’d like to talk about. We’d like to talk.

Karin (23:23.307)
Right.

Karin (23:34.666)
Yeah, and I think just to add to that, to do all of those things with seven or eight different companies or people, you’ve got your IT person, you’ve got your SEO person, you’ve got your website person, you’ve got an email person, also doesn’t make sense. So, you know, that is just a disaster and the likelihood of there being, to come back to your point about communication, like,

coherent communication, coherent strategy plans, even a coherent platform that everybody’s using to organize everything is not high. So once again, putting it all under one umbrella, one strategy, one funnel that hits all of those just comprehensive parts of your client journey. And I hate using the phrase client journey. Do you have a better one that you found? Because I haven’t found anything better about it.

I can’t, it just, for some reason it’s like nails on the chalkboard for me.

Doug (24:35.349)
That’s the industry that you’re in. A client is a customer. So if perhaps to your point about, and we haven’t gotten into this, words matter. Customers, if law firms thought of their clients as customers, there might be a different mindset and it might work better. And I’ll give you a perfect example, Karin. In the restaurant business, most people, most restaurateurs consider the people that come in their restaurants as customers. But

Karin (24:38.983)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Karin (24:47.084)
Yeah.

Doug (25:03.485)
If you change that mindset to guest, that makes a whole different, and the change that I’ve worked with so much typically talk about multiple locations. Listen, we’re gonna go hit some stores. We’re gonna go visit some stores, stores. They’re restaurants. If you change the narrative to restaurants and guests versus customers and stores, that makes a difference organizationally. If you can get it in there.

Karin (25:19.519)
Yes.

Doug (25:28.129)
I would assume that on, it was law firms, the same could be instead of clients. Now, hey, they’re customers. Or maybe because they’re coming to the office, maybe they are a guest. Maybe we should look at it that way.

Karin (25:38.27)
Yeah, I think that’s great because just the idea of sales and your being a business is sometimes tricky to talk to law firms about, especially more established like the partners who really want to believe that people are hiring them for their reputation and their experience, which they are, but they are not going to hire you if they land on your website and it looks horrible and you say the wrong things and you have a horrible

presentation and positioning. So they really are customers. Like you’re not gonna, these are not gonna be family members. These are people who are gonna pay you for a service.

Doug (26:15.825)
Hmm. There are at the minimum there are prospects at that stage and you want to move them through the funnel down to purchase with blog content and other things you do in the middle of the funnel to get somebody that’s landed on your website to actually go from a prospect to a customer or guest.

Karin (26:22.719)
Right, right.

Karin (26:37.118)
Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of the guest because it also really reinforces the middle to the lower part of the funnel that we’re talking about too, where I was picturing when you said that, like higher end hotels, where they just really take care of things and they’re thinking about details before you do. And that’s the idea with a great law firm is you’re taking care of those clients and they’re assuming that you understand

the law and what they might need more than they do. And so if you can present that and promote that in a way that, hey, we worked together last year and this law changed and it may affect your business. And I want you to know, because I’m here for you, I’ve got your back and give me a call and we can talk about it. And bam, there’s new business. Yeah, okay, awesome. Okay, so you mentioned it earlier and I’m excited about this book, but it is now time for the book review.

Doug (27:22.397)
Great example. Yeah, great example.

Karin (27:34.166)
And we’ve got a whole library on the site. And I’ve mentioned it pretty much every episode. So people are probably used to it now, but tell me about this book that you are going to recommend and review.

Doug (27:45.009)
The book is called Degrowth Gears. I referenced it earlier as the basis for how we build our processes at Chief Hot Satters when we have a fractional Chief Marketing Officer deal. And it explains the detailed, more detailed explanation, although it’s still kind of, it’s easy enough to read on like an airplane trip. You got a two or three hour flight, fast readers probably get it done in an airplane read. And because they simplified it, like there’s a lot more to it, and that’s why we’re here. But for a CEO that

Karin (28:05.111)
Perfect.

Doug (28:13.413)
doesn’t know much about marketing or an attorney that doesn’t know much about marketing, understanding that they need to go through the first gear, which is the insights gear, as we discussed before, learn about customers, competition and company to go to the strategy gear to let that information inform strategy. So you know what your offerings are or what they should be and how you can change them and how you should position yourself, what your brand strategy looks like, et cetera, and find out what you’re what’s really unique in your messaging.

to where you then go to the execution and figure out which parts of the tactical marketing things you do will impact which parts of the funnel. So awareness is one thing in a market versus what you’re gonna do with customer nurturing with email. Or you can actually do email blasts and it can be an awareness thing but probably not very successful, right? So.

The Growth Gears goes through, there was some great examples and some manufacturing and some other industries on how things work and how we’ve got a four matrix deal on how to pick offerings and whatnot. So, and we’ve got workshops and things up the yin yang on our Dropbox site, et cetera. But the book itself written by Pete Hayes, who is the co-founder of Chief Outsiders. And then our current, our current chief marketing officer of all CMOs, excuse me, Pete Hayes, the co-founder is Art Saxby. I said that wrong. Sorry.

Karin (29:22.804)
Oh, nice!

Doug (29:30.053)
So Art Saxby is the co-founder, Pete Hayes is the CMO of all CMOs. They wrote this book several years ago and it’s based on research from the business school at University of Texas. Because what they found was, what they found was that great operators, people that were great at operating their business, like operators, and in this case attorneys, they’re really good at what they do in the operations. And some of the things we’ve talked about, some of your clients may call their clients, customers or guests, et cetera. They’re really good inside the four walls.

Karin (29:40.983)
Oh nice.

Doug (29:59.741)
All right, they very rarely look outside the window. It’s outside the window that you can start to see what other things, how your competition behaves, what’s going on, et cetera, to figure out how to move forward. And what they found in this research was, and I forgot the numbers, I’d have to open the right page and I don’t wanna bore your listeners with that. But there’s a delta that’s fairly significant on marketing and IT people tend to look out the window more often, where that’s why in some industries, CMOs are becoming CEOs.

Karin (30:04.535)
Yeah.

Doug (30:28.981)
And then operators and financial people, they tend to look inside. So you really want to take that look outside the window approach, which is why Art Saxby called us chief outsiders, because we come from that outside approach. Right. And then use that university of Texas research that was done about 10 years ago. And the basis for why they wrote the book, the growth gears.

Karin (30:30.56)
Yes.

Karin (30:40.666)
Oh.

Karin (30:52.57)
So as you were talking, it was sounding to me like this sort of a surface level intro to some of the marketing classes I took in my MBA. But then as you were describing it, it’s this marketing strategy and theory and how it works and why it works and why you need to kind of have all these pieces combined with operations, which I hadn’t put those two pieces together.

But that’s really what these fractional CMO programs are doing. They’re taking all that strategy and the execution. So there’s the strategy. There’s what’s the second step phase?

Doug (31:33.689)
The first growth gear is insight, second is strategy.

Karin (31:37.674)
is the… Got it. Okay, so looking outside is the first thing. That’s the outsider part, looking outside the window. The second part is the strategy, and then is the execution. Do I have that right?

Doug (31:48.517)
Yes, but technically the insight you’re looking inside and outside because you are looking at your company But you’re then looking outside for the competition and what you should be doing for your customer

Karin (31:51.688)
I’m sorry.

Karin (32:00.23)
Yeah, I think all of that is so many conversations that I’ve had where they come and these potential clients or prospects are talking to me about how things aren’t working like we were mentioning before, and it’s because they’re missing those pieces. It’s because they haven’t really looked at how they, for example, how their website compares to their competitors. So are you saying the exact same thing as the guy down the street?

Do you have just a horrible picture of the skyline that the other guy used as well? Are you, you know, how are you doing things that are different combined with what’s happening internally that might have some holes or things that need to be fixed or repaired or added to? Okay, that’s awesome. The growth gears, we will add that on the show notes in the library, we will promote that on social media and all that stuff. So if you’re…

listening to the show, you’ll find the links easily. They’ll be there and easily found. All right, so Doug, what is one thing that you know that works when it comes to marketing, strategy, positioning, all of this good stuff we’ve been talking about?

Doug (33:14.105)
The one thing that works is understanding the customer. You need to know what your customer really wants. What is their pain and which boat will you use to get to their pleasure island so you satisfy that pain issue that we talked about earlier. That’s the one thing that works. But it’s not an easy process. It’s gonna be a combination of meetings, conversations, maybe in our case we might do workshops, whatever. But it takes a lot of exploration, both internally and externally.

to figure out what that is because if you are same like everybody else, you’re not gonna get anywhere and it’s the companies that truly differentiate themselves that make the biggest difference. And then of course, there is something to be said for the great execution, both tactically and operationally because you can have some of the best positioning and messaging, but you don’t follow through, it doesn’t work. So you’ve got to have it all put together. But the one thing that works, I know for sure, if you figure out what your unique.

Karin (34:01.613)
Yes.

Karin (34:07.587)
Yeah.

Doug (34:13.005)
proposition as your unique selling proposition as you call USP prior that when you did your MBA or There’s other terms for it, but that’s the one I was most familiar with

Karin (34:20.03)
Yeah, yeah. UVP, yeah, unique value proposition, but it’s just your uniqueness, whatever the unique thing is that you talk about.

Doug (34:27.921)
Correct. If you nail that and to find out what that is, you need to talk to your customers. Do you voice the customer, do interviews, do focus groups, do whatever you can. And if you’re on a budget, there are inexpensive ways to do all of that. And then once you think you’ve got to figure out, go back and test it with them. See if like, does this resonate with you? Test it and test and learn. Cause one of the brands I was with in my past, when we first came up with that

Karin (34:47.114)
Yes. Yeah.

Doug (34:56.105)
one set of four or five words and now it’s about six, seven years later. The message is the same, but the words have been tweaked, I think at least twice, maybe three times, because you learn what works and what doesn’t work as you do research and understand your customers. So understand who your target customer is and understand what they need to get from pain Island to pleasure.

Karin (35:21.434)
say too, for most lawyers, they’re usually coming to you with a pretty clear pain. They’re not usually coming to you just to say hi or check in. It’s not like you go to your dentist just to get your teeth cleaned. It’s not like that. So this piece, usually, even though it seems challenging, when we sit down with clients, this is usually the easier part. Where are the pain, you know, especially if we’re talking to like criminal defense attorneys,

Doug (35:24.913)
We’ll see.

Karin (35:47.926)
personal injury attorneys where people have literally been hurt. That’s the easy part. And so you can, if you have any experience with this, which you should, that’s the easy part. Go talk to one or two of those great clients that you’ve had. But what you don’t do and what the mistake that we see all the time is you don’t base this off of…

John Smith’s website down the street, who I think John Smith is doing really good. So I’m just going to look at his website and then I’m going to keep sending you that link and say, hey, can we do what John Smith is doing? That’s not what you do. And that is exactly the opposite of every successful accomplishment you’re going to have with all of this positioning that we’re talking about. So you have to kind of put horse blinders on and ignore John Smith’s website because John Smith’s website is working for John Smith. John Smith is not for you.

Doug (36:34.265)
Knowing what they do as one thing, but trying to duplicate it is a bad idea and I agree with you 100%.

Karin (36:42.406)
Yeah, you’re going to just completely put a grenade in all of your efforts and it’s just it’s going to reverse everything that you’re trying to do. So awesome. Okay, Doug Reif-Schneider is a fractional CMO at Chief Outsiders. This has been a great conversation. I feel like we really covered kind of very broad marketing concepts and tactics, but also the strategy in how to make these things work for

A lot of firms who kind of start with this place of feeling really stuck and not knowing why it’s not working.

Doug (37:12.861)
Exactly. Go through insights, learn some strategy, put it to execution, and you’ll build a growth engine.

Doug (37:20.785)
Thank you very much, Karan, for having me.

Karin (37:20.827)
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.