Getting The First Sentence Of Your Webpage Perfect with Joe Martin

Speaker A: This is the last episode of season five of the B2B Community Builder Show. And surprise, surprise, we're ending it on a selfish note. Here's what I mean by that. As I am re strategizing the direction of my company, the direction of this show. Stay tuned for that. I am just really deep into redesigning my website and getting all my materials ready. And I realized that that first line of copy, that first top of fold thing that your website says is like the most important thing to really, really nail. Because it's the one receptacle that we all have that anybody that finds anything great that we put out, that's the first place that they're gonna go. So I've been obsessed with it. And to my wonderful surprise, my good buddy Joe Martin has, um, become an expert in this, which I was really impressed by. And you know, he's a past star of the show, super smart guy, really brilliant at the customer Persona thing. And he realized that this was a great one problem to solve for people. So whether it's category design and the problem that you solve, whether it is knowing your clients perfectly or niching down or doing all these things, this conversation with Joe is super duper valuable. From the thing he teaches to understanding his strategy and what he's done. And I had to have him on as the last cast of season five. If you want to know what's next, go to the end of the show. Or if you know better yet, just listen to this episode. But I'll let you know what's coming up next after this episode. But for right now, pay attention because Joe Martin is a, uh, frickin genius. And it's not gonna be hard because he's super animated. Enjoy Joe Martin.

Speaker B: If you know how it, then you

Speaker C: know how it might be. But think what it would look like if you grow your own community. It ain't easy. That's why you're listening. To hear experiences from others, just like you and me. Welcome to the B2B Community Builder podcast. A show that was started because if you can unlock the power of having a community around your business, then you will create a source of referrals, validation, marketing content and product feedback that will be unbeatable. But who has time to think about building a community when you need to be making sure that your team has what it needs to succeed in serving clients and bringing in revenue. That is why we'll be talking to business leaders like you and I that have cracked the code on why the community play is so valuable, how to implement tactics that got them there while still serving short term goals and what they can teach you that they have mastered. This show is for you. If you are a CEO, cmo, or simply a rainmaker that has realized that without a community, you are just a commodity, but haven't figured out how to add it to your infinite list of priorities, this show is for you. If you are a community professional or trying to be a community professional that is trying to convince leadership about the need to invest in a community strategy, this show is not for you. If you think transactions are more valuable than relationships. I am your host and chief executive connector Pablo Gonzalez, co founder of Bethestage Live, a marketing company that specializes in relationship driven growth. I invented the relationship flywheel and hopefully I'm your new best friend. So smash that subscribe button, leave a rating when you do, and get ready to plug into the power of community creation for business development.

Speaker A: Let's go.

Speaker C: Ah, welcome, welcome, welcome to the B2B Community Builder Show. Today, Joe, as people start trickling in here, you're just showing me a new trick, man. You just started switching around your uh, your camera on zoom and stepping up

Speaker B: your game a little bit. Look at this. Last time we talked, I'm in the outside sun room enjoying life. Now I'm stepping stuck in the inside office.

Speaker C: I love it, man. It is, uh, not a lot of people get the, uh, not a lot of people get the honor of uh, two time attendees, two time guests on the b, uh, two B Community Builder show, man.

Speaker B: No, they don't. Uh, feeling honored. And I have to tell you, since our last interview, like, oh, you're just such a good interviewer, Pablo. Like you, you ask the right questions. This is, this sets up for a fun conversation.

Speaker C: I appreciate it, I appreciate it, I appreciate it. It is also another momentous occasion, um, because this is the end of season five. But, um, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick us off because I think we got, we got folks in the, in the house. Do me a favor, check in in the chat. I want to see that you're here. I appreciate you being here. Uh, you ready to go, Joe? Welcome everybody to the episode 2026 of the B2B Community Builder Show. This is a, the last episode of season five. We are going to out with a blast with um, one of my favorite all time guests from before coming back on the show. Um, because every time I talk to him I'm like, oh my God, this guy's just coming up with more and more genius stuff. And whereas before it was this like, customer Persona that I was obsessed with. All of a sudden I hear him talking about the thing that I've been most obsessed with over the last couple months, which is the first sentence on your website. That little magical piece of copy that according to our guest today, controls your business. He's a Ted X speaker, he is a, um, Instagram musician. He does world class covers of acoustic rap songs, which is one of my favorite genres of all time. Uh, and a super cool guy. Joe. Joe Martin. Welcome to Pablo.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me again, excited to be here, excited to dig into all the, what I've narrowed down. I think the big thing I'm excited to talk into today is it's been over 24 years in this industry of looking at design and marketing. Uh, I've, uh, built and sold two businesses and just how does it all tie together? Where does it all come back together? And damn it, Pablo. It's the first sentence. It's the first sentence.

Speaker C: Makes too much sense. Makes too much sense to not talk about it. Joe, I want to welcome the community. I appreciate you being here. I know we switched up, uh, last show of the season. I just kind of like decided instantaneously just because I'm in a specific moment in my business where I'm doing some really exciting things. We're going to talk about that the second hour on our Relationship Driven Growth open mic session when we bring everybody on. But I do want to welcome Venia, our community scientist. I want to welcome Prattiti, my friend, real, uh, estate expert and coach. Uh, we got Alexander Loretti in the house. We got Alex Adams in the house. Uh, Dan Windler, I believe a couple of those signed up the moment that you started promoting this thing, man. So I appreciate you pulling, pulling the folks here, uh, with your star power, Joe. Uh, I wanna just jump, uh, right into it, man. First sentence of the website. Pretty bold thing to niche into as the one thing that you promote. Uh, why is it so important and why are you betting your, your third company on this?

Speaker B: Oh, it's, it's that, it's the expectations that we set from the moment that someone comes into contact the brand. Uh, one of my, one of my favorite studies that I just heard of recently, I need to look this one up more. But there was a study where they gave people like a piece of paper to look at, pull it up, and it was, uh, different little pictures of a man slowly turning into a woman, like just a little bit, uh, each frame and they asked someone to go through and say okay, at what point does the man turn into a woman? Like, at what point does the picture change? And the people would get about 2/3 of the way through and say, right about here is where it changes. And then they did it again and they said, great, we're going to start with the woman. At what point does it turn into a man? Two thirds of the way through. That initial expectation is so strong that we set to beginning. It's influencing everything. Everything is influenced by that initial sales outreach.

Speaker C: Wow. Um, as venue Community Sciences puts you in the chat, that's an evocative and critical representation of the ship of these. You think somebody was going to give you that one. That's, that's, that's the type of people we got here. That's, that's, um. Okay, so it is the. As somebody who is obsessed with the relationship building and as somebody who likes to network and do all these things and gets asked how to follow up, I'm always like, I don't really give that much m thought into the follow up because I really lean into the first impression. And if you make a great first impression, it completely changes the dynamic of the relationship forever. All right, so I see this, I see this like above the fold, first line of the website. It is your first impression of your company. It is how people, when they first log in, um, is, are they legit? Are they modern? Are they, you know, like, are they, is it even for me? Is this.

Speaker B: Do they get me?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Do they get me?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And when we, when we try to talk to everyone, we end up talking to no one. We've, we've heard that adage yet so many companies still do it. When I ask people who's, who's that target customer, who you're going after? And it's always, you know, 35 to 55 year old and it's this. And you know, it's a woman. And. Well, Pablo, I've never been a 35 or 55 year old woman. I know that the needs of those two people are different. We, we can't talk to both of those people the same. Yeah.

Speaker C: Listen, at what point, at uh, what point did you, uh, at what point did you decide this is it? What was the aha.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like, I know that you went from before when you were on the show, you were talking about that Persona, like, right, really nailing it in. You had amazing questions to really dial it in. I remember you opened up my mind to just like going like seven layers deep into why this person is doing something and I feel like from the outside looking in, this is an evolution of knowing the Persona and knowing the Persona, um, being really, really valuable. But even more valuable is the fact that you can deliver this one line of copy by knowing the Persona. What was the, uh, am I. Am I right there? What was the aha moment for you of. Of this thing becoming the thing?

Speaker B: As we worked with more and more customers, I think it was just in that time of digging into more information, as we developed more customer acquisition strategies, we started realizing the messaging was one of the most important things we were presenting. And then as we looked at that even further, we realized that first sentence was one of the most important things we were providing and that that's what was setting the tone for everything else. That if that sentence was in line, if that sentence spoke to the right person, to the right problem, to the right benefit, everything else fell in line from there with the acquisition strategy. But the acquisition strategy depended on that initial messaging and knowing who that initial person was.

Speaker C: Can you give me an example of that?

Speaker B: M. Uh, we recently worked with a IT company, and what we found was that the IT company shouldn't be selling it. Everything they were doing their first sentence was managed IT services for law firms. And, you know, he'd listened to me. Uh, he'd taken my advice for years. He narrowed down to say, great, we just work with law firms. But when we dug into that one target customer they didn't want to buy, to them was big. It's cybersecurity. It's all of my systems. It's all of the expectations that that person has when they read the sentence. Managed IT services. And that's why a lot of times we see that first sentence as taglines, and we see people write a first sentence and they say, m. That thing is good. The problem is that it's good to them. Um, it's good to them because they have all the back knowledge of what that sentence means. But when someone else reads that sentence for the first time, it falls flat. And so at that IT company, we help them shift to talk more about, hey, we're going to help you get your calendars and get things in line so you can work remotely easier. We don't need to have a big conversation about it. We need to find the problem the person has and speak to that problem.

Speaker C: So, good man. This is. This, to me, hits on all the veins of things that I'm kind of obsessed with. What one one is. Category design, right? This idea of she who can state the problem the best will Be known to have the solution, right? So evangelize the problem, and you'll be known to have the best solution. And you're doing that in the first sentence. The other thing that is a little bit less obvious, there is, uh, at some point, I read Alex Hormozi's book, and at some point I started realizing how much the offer has a. Such a weight on the success of the company, right? Like, this idea that if you can. If you can offer something with a quicker speed to win and it's more clear what they want and, you know, like these different things, um, it really, really changes things. And for me, as a guy that is a terrible asker of things, I. When I. When I focus on what I offer, that feels very, very empowering. Um, and what I'm hearing from you is that you're injecting more offer and more problem into the first line of the. Of the copy.

Speaker B: Uh, and I want to find that. That problem they have as well. It can't just be. I want to know the thorn in their side that's up here, not the one that's down here, not the one they don't care about. What is that thing that's keeping them up? It's there, it's hurting them. That you're gonna be able to say, I can remove that for you if you'd like. Like, it is how the company's gonna do it. And that's what I see a lot. If we. If we think about the sales arguments, we picture three boxes in front of you, and in the first box is the problem the person has. The second box is your solution to that problem. The third box is how you do it. And what we see all the time is people, they love Chicago, they love to take that three box and put it at the front. And so all of a sudden, we're three. One, two. And that's not how we want that conversation to go. We need to lead with, this is your problem. I can solve that problem. This is how I solve it with my service, with being an IT company.

Speaker C: All right, man, I'm in. I want to. I want to know how to do this thing right. Like, the three boxes. I get it. Right? Like, um, how do you. How do you start when somebody. When someone generally brings you a. A web is, you know, are people bringing you a website already built? I assume everybody already has the website, right? So, like, what's the. How do you walk people through this process for them to do it themselves?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, we do it all in six weeks. And so it's a couple interviews with the key stakeholders and there's people who do, they do the work similar to what we do. Uh, one of the differences is there's companies that like to come in and say, hey, I'm going to go talk to your current customers and I'm going to find out why they love you and then build from there. Which, yes, yes, that's what we want to do. We want to go from the customers. My problem is initially I need to start with the business owner. I need to start with the person who created this vision. Because whatever messaging those customers were sold on to begin with, it's already tainted. If that initial messaging was pushing, hey, we get this thing to you really fast and it's going to be really easy. When we talk to those customers, they're going to be reiterating, hey, this thing was fast, this thing was easy. We're going to get other pieces of, out of it as well. But it's not always what the owner intended to create. And that's where we go through about a three hour workshop with the owner, with the key stakeholders. And just, I've got the questions of, who is this person? Why do they care?

Speaker C: Got it. So it is a. So you sit down with, um, talk to us. So if I'm, if I'm right now rewinding, rewriting, rewriting my, my webpage, I'm rewriting the first line. Give me a couple of examples of questions that I, that I need to be asking myself.

Speaker B: Oh, the first one, the biggest one, Pablo. And this is where I always see the aha, ah moment. We work with clients. I, uh, ask them if the person is male or female. Everyone, uh, is very sweet. Everyone always says, well, it could be either. I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know they don't want to be exclusive. And that's one of the big things. No one, A lot of people fail to pick one person because they think, if I pick one person, I'm excluding all of these other people. And please, please, everyone watching, please get that out of your mind. Get that out of your mind. Not a thing. When we talk to one person, we are not excluding everyone else. Adele didn't write a love song for a million people. Adele wrote it for one. One person. But a million people still connect with it. And that's what I want you to do. Pick that one person that you're going to, who is going to love you, love what you do all the way through, and go from there. So, biggest question I always ask, it's that, uh, aha moment is, how old is this person?

Speaker A: Hm.

Speaker B: The answer I get is normally 40, uh, to 50 or 30 to 40 years old. And then I have to ask them again, how old is this person? And that's usually like, oh, oh, we're doing one person. I got it. And then we get into their. Okay, they're 42 years old. Great. Where'd they grow up? What did they go to college for? Are they married? Are they happy? Do they floss? What did they eat for dinner last night? Do they drive to work? Do they even care about doing better at their job to hire you in to begin with? Because if they don't, let's not waste our resources trying to win that person. Let's spend our resources towards the person who is most likely to say yes and work with you.

Speaker C: So narrow in on one person, right? Like, describe them as detailed as you possibly can. Right?

Speaker B: Fall in love with them. Fall in love with them. Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Okay.

Speaker C: Fall in love with them. Right. What is, what does that look like? So, age, gender, where they went to college, what their favorite, um, drink of choice is, what, you know, what, ah, what brand they play. You know, like, are. Are we just doing physical attributes? At what point do we start talking about the things that they come to you for?

Speaker B: Uh, so with what we do, the first hour and a half. So the way we've designed this process, uh, the first hour and a half is just about all those small details about the person. And one of the reasons I need to do that is because I need to displace the founder or the owner's ego. I need to make sure they know this thing isn't built for me. It's not about me. I need them to take it out of their head and say, okay, this is who I'm building it for. I found that it takes an hour and a half to drill that in, to get into these small, inane questions. What is their dog's name? And it creates this permanent shift once we do it, that then they can never go back to unseeing that person. There's people that we've worked with, uh, six, seven years ago on some of this stuff who have reached back out to me to tell me they still have that person printed out, hanging up in their office, and they reference it all the time, that it's always there. Once we go through this, once this shift is made, oh, it's permanent.

Speaker C: Reminds me of the Bezos letters and that whole thing of, like, how Bezos at all, at all meetings, there's like an empty seat and the empty seat is the client. Right. Like this idea of not thinking from, from yourself out from, but from the person that you're trying to serve in and, and the idea that it takes an hour and a half just to get beyond. Stop thinking about who's going to marry your baby. You know, like something, you know, start thinking about why your kid is so great and start asking yourself who would actually want to marry. Marry him? Um, is, uh, is a real. I could, I could absolutely see that based on myself and people that I work with.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like, I, I definitely went through this whole thing of like falling in love with all the things that this Internet talk show thing does. Um, and it's taken me literally three years to get to, you know, really some breakthroughs on who actually cares and like what it does for them. So, so once you, once you, we do that, an hour and a half figuring out, paint a picture of them, you know, like write a love letter to them, engage in a fan fiction story with them. Um, once you, once you have that person really, really well done out, you've, you have uh, decoupled the business owner from their products and you now have them standing next to the client looking in at the product. What's the next conversation?

Speaker B: Then we need to get into the more specifics around some of the behavioral and purchasing psychology. So then they need to know what problem do they have? How are they trying to solve that problem now? What mistakes have they made trying to solve that problem? Uh, one of my favorite set of questions is what are the good expectations this person has of your company and what are the bad expectations that. Hm. If we go back to that IT company example, when we walk through it with the lawyer and we're like, hey, you know, the lawyer, what does he think of when he thinks of an IT company? What are some of his bad expectations? And it's, it's going to take forever. It's going to be a gigantic project. It's going to interrupt his whole team. He's going to need to spend all of his time taking care of this. Like the whole thing that those expectations are coming across in those first sentences when we put that stuff out there. And that's, we need to look at how do we manage those expectations better from that very first sentence.

Speaker C: Got it. All right, so person's, um, detailed. You spend all this time like getting them in and then now you just start essentially saying in your own words what their experience, what they think their experience is going to be, what they Wish their experience was what they're trying to solve for, um, you know, like those kinds of things. And do you, do you need to ask it multiple different ways for the same thing? I do people.

Speaker B: Okay, yep. Yeah. The questions have been, uh, so a lot of Companies collect maybe five to 10 data points on a target customer. Their age, their demographic, how much do they make, what's their job title? And they kind of leave it there. We uh, dig into about 75 different data points on the person. There's just so much more I need to know, even through the purchase process. Yeah, and we worked with a company out in Catalina that was trying to bring in businesses from LA to come do excursions on Catalina with them, to take their car, bring their corporate business to Catalina island to have a day vacation. And we built the Persona of the business owner and as we got down to now the purchasing process of it, what we found out is it's not the owner. He's not the one going online looking for something to do. He's assigning it to 24 year old Brittany to say, hey, go find something fun for us to do and bring me some options. And so that target customer changes. And this is why part of it is let's identify that person, talk about some of those behaviors and how they're going to buy and let's just go through it, let's just talk through it step by step. What is this person going to do that I've seen so many companies love to build from the company out and I think a lot of marketing companies support this because they're going to come in and say, Pablo, what's your mission?

Speaker C: What are your values?

Speaker B: What do you care about? And oh, uh, Pablo, I don't give a shit. I don't care about your mission and values. I need to build from the person in what do they care about? Let's start there and build that path to know that we've figured out every step.

Speaker C: So I'm here.

Speaker B: I do care about you. I do care about you. By the way, I'm sorry, that was just an example, Pablo.

Speaker C: Joe, I, man, I can tell you care because the energy you bring in, the theatrical, the theatricality you bring means, means the world to me, man. So like, do not, don't you worry about me. M having a great time over here.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker C: so what I'm hearing is mapping the client journey, right? Like from, from when, when that person is problem unaware to becoming problem aware and who brings it to them. And, and then from being problem aware to solution unaware and how they figure out, you know, where they start to look for solutions, uh, what their expectations are, when they're doing it. Once they go from solution aware, you know, how they start kind of like contextualizing it, what they're probably going to hear from, from their friends or you know, different things like that, right. All the way through till um,

Speaker B: uh

Speaker C: how far through it do you do it man? Do you go. Do you go into like until they purchase? Do you go until they succeed and then they are looking for another one. Do you go until they succeed and they're self servant like how, how far through that customer journey do you map?

Speaker B: Uh, for the initial part that we do to get to that first sentence that we need to create, it's up until the point of purchase.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: So if we need to continue working with a client from there, if they need more help, we can finish mapping it out through the process, through the nurturing and getting them from there. But in order to write that first sentence, I need to know how they're going to buy and got to that point.

Speaker C: So you have, you have a model of a person completely formed. You have a um, what's a MapQuest printed out directions, uh, from when they um, from when their boss brings it to them to the point where they hire you. What's next after that?

Speaker B: So that kind of covers week two and week three of working with us. In week four you leave us alone and you let us put it all together. So I've got all the interviews from you, I have all the answers from you. Uh, we get competitors. I'm going to look at competitor research. I'm going to look at the first email you send back to someone when they reach out. I'm going to look at any customer surveys you've conducted, I'm going to look at any reviews you might have and all of those then all get into the data. So that comes back to the team. We distill it all put together the customer acquisition strategy with that new first sentence is the cherry on top.

Speaker C: Got it. Okay. So, so if I'm hearing. Because I'm as you can tell, I'm just trying to deconstruct this to do this myself. Um, so you, you are. So it probably is going to take somebody a week or two to really just like be in a, you know, be thinking about it, be journaling, have their team together bouncing ideas and up and down until like they const perfect model of the client takes another week to just really understand the every step on the client journey. Right. Like printing out that MapQuest, um, and then. And then it'll take another week of sounds like from you, uh, data point and signal gathering from everything else. From the. What is the thing that you're sending out to looking at reviews to hear kind of like what it sounds like people think of you so that you can contextualize beyond just what's inside that room. Um, other you're looking at competitors, competitive analysis, um, stuff like that. All of this before you actually start

Speaker B: writing down anything, Living it and then distilling it down. Yeah, I just need to soak it all in.

Speaker C: What are the biggest obstacles during this? Like, during this, like, model creation and map questing and, and like, data gathering. Where do people get hung up on this? Like, where do you. Where do you find yourself being like, hey, guys, right now you've just gone a little bit too far. Let's take it. Let's take it easy.

Speaker B: Usually, uh, during the interview process, so while asking those questions, if it was easy enough to just hand over the questions, it'd be great. But, um, I know the answers that I need to get, and my team, we know the answers that we're looking for. And so it's kind of coaxing and pushing and hitting a little bit that one of the clients, uh, he's like, joe, I love it. You know, I think I'm done giving you answers and you just keep pushing me for more. And it's, it's because it's in here. Everyone knows it. Like, so much of what I do is just listen.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: If you were to kind of like, distill how you sort through what's a good answer and what's a bad answer.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like, what's the, uh, what are you looking for? When does it feel right for you? If you know, obviously you just have an intuition about it. But, like, how would you describe the, um. Yeah, we finally got this thing.

Speaker B: Uh, I need to get them past what I call the big six. A lot of companies default their value to one of these six things. They think their value is saving time, saving money. It's easy to use. It's revolutionary. It helps you get control. Or my favorite one, we've been in service this long. But the problem with those is they're not unique. They don't help to address the specific problem that the person's having and they're not going to do. If we're talking about saving time, uh, Chicago Public Transportation can say, hey, I save you time. If we're talking about saving money, Taco Bell can Say, hey, I save you money. If we wanted to talk about, uh, control. Nesquik gives me control over how much chocolate syrup I want to put inside my milk. Like, we need to find better, more structured arguments that speak more to the things that are actually impacting that person instead of these generalities.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker C: So beyond the generalities, man, I. Dude, I struggle with this so much.

Speaker A: It was.

Speaker C: I remember. I remember spending, like, a year just on this, like, thesis of, yeah, we shortened the sales cycle. And, uh, and being like, that is so completely hollow, you know? Like, I intuitively knew it going out of yearly planning, and yet we still spent the whole year trying to sell it. And I really wish that I would have talked to you, um, more at that point. But that being said, so you have this figured out, right? So what I'm. What I'm really hearing, Joe, is I'm hearing that you have created an extreme level of differentiation, uh, as far as who it's, you know, like, somewhere in the combination of, like, who it's for. Exactly. Um, what it is that the problem that you're actually solving in order of beyond, just, like, this, like, overall thing, but a specific Soren in a specific point that hurts particularly much. And, um, and then you also are contextualizing it to what everybody else is saying to a certain extent, reaches a very differentiated, um, message, a very differentiated pain point problem to solve for a specific person. Is that kind of right?

Speaker B: It is. It is. And then every word we use in there. So one of the. One of the guys that works in the team with me on some of these first sentences has his masters in poetry. And so the sentences, they are poetic, sir, by the time we get done with them. One of my favorite ones, I just had a really big challenge recently because we work with B2B.M. We just worked with a fractional CFO, the IT company, the cannabis delivery company. Recently, uh, we had a client who's a beauty show, and they wanted us to help rewrite the first sentence to get more people to come to their beauty show. And I remember when the project came in, I was like, okay, here's the real test, if the process we've created really holds up, because holy shit, I never planned on helping a beauty show. Uh, their first sentence was celebrating the next hundred years of beauty, which just didn't. Didn't mean anything. It didn't tell me why I want to go to the show, what it is. Uh, so we changed it. And the messaging was so radical that they waited and they're building next Year's campaigns around the new messaging. And I got 13 people, Pablo, 13 people on a call to say this first sentence is us and we'd love it. Uh, their new first sentence, Crazy inspiring beauty show packed with badass hair and original people. And they responded. I would buy a ticket for that thing immediately just based on that title. And when you look at it comparison wise against the competitors, no one is speaking like that. But for their 25 year old salon owner that they're trying to get into these shows, it's spot on with what they're looking for. That differentiation from the industry.

Speaker C: Crazy inspiring beauty show that what?

Speaker B: Packed with, uh, badass hair and original people.

Speaker C: Talk to me about each of those words. Right. So is crazy inspiring? I mean, I'll try. Right, like is crazy inspiring talking to the, like the future state of the person that is going to be, you know, like seeing them on stage, right. Like wanting to see them, uh, packed with badass hair. Is talking to that salon owner as like differentiating that like if you do this, you're a badass on stage. And then packed with original people. It's just like kind of like self validation, future state of everybody involved of like this is what makes us unique kind of thing. Uh, I mean, am I warm?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yep, yep. And you're getting on that self validation side that I need the person to be able to see themselves in that sentence as well. That's the big part of it.

Speaker C: Tell me more. So who is the person there? Describe to me that person. Build me the model of the person,

Speaker B: uh, settled on, oh, 25 year old salon owner. Uh, her name is Jordan. She lives in the burbs. She has about four or five people that work for her already. She doesn't really like the industry because she thinks the industry is a little bit older. It's not really talking to her needs. It's focused more on these bigger things. And as we dug into it with the owners, we found out just like where some of the messaging had come from to begin with. And a lot of it was distilled down from distributors that the salon owners would get the distributor and the product messaging and pass that through as their messaging. And the problem is that they're targeting this end result person and not the person who's attending the conference. And so that was the big shift for them, that they were targeting the customer's customer instead of going after the salon order themselves.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker C: So like Vidal Sassoon or whatever is targeting the person whose hair I'm going to cut. But you're trying to attract the person who is cutting the hair. Yeah, the hair. Right. I'm obviously a. Obviously a dude out here is putting badass hair speaks to today's generation. Venia is putting no side parts allowed. They take center stage. Right. Like all the speakers. I, Man, I. I think a lot about this stuff when I'm. When I'm designing podcasts and. And, uh, or shows and. Or whatever I'm doing. I think of the idea of the name of something needs to be flattering, uh, to the person that you're inviting to be the guest, right? Like, oh, oh, oh, you think I'm a community builder.

Speaker B: That's. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker C: I want to come on the show and a future, like a future state of the person I want to listen to.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Like, oh, I want to listen to B2B Community Builders because I myself want to become one. And it sounds like that's kind of like, um, the thread that you are, uh, weaving or the needle that you're threading, however you say that, um, in this first line. It's pretty cool, man.

Speaker B: It is. Yeah. We just helped a different IT company, actually. Uh, this one's based out in California, and for them, we actually helped them come up with a new name for the company as well. And the name needs to reflect that end result of what they're going to get. And so their name was Avrio Networks, which just didn't. No one knows what it means in the sit. Well, uh, their new name that we're helping them roll out, and we're very excited to be working with him on the brand and building that with the company is simply up it. Night and day. Night and day with just words. This is just a name.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, simply up, man. I keep going back to this idea of category design, right? Like, and. And one of. One of the concepts there is the. The adjacent possible, right? Like, how can you. How can you name something. How can you create language that makes someone be like, oh, there's this one little leap that you can take here, and it's very tangible and very doable versus I'm jumping off the cliff.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Um, and. And. And it feels like that's kind of part of. That's part of the magic, right, Is it's. Having it. Having it be simple enough to understand simply up, right? Like, oh, yeah, I just want this. I just want this stuff to be done. And it's not like, full service digitech, you know, like. Or whatever, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And where. Where some of this comes from is behind the scenes. I'm a conversion rate optimizer.

Speaker C: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: This is where. This is where so much of this stemmed from. Of how do you increase conversion rates? And years ago, when we worked with tourism websites, we ran a test on the tourism websites of what should the button text say? Should it say buy tickets or should it say book now and book now? Book removes the idea of payments and ideas from your mind instead of buying. So it's a little lower priority. But what we tested and we found out was if that button says see dates, 25% more people enter the checkout process. Two words, 25% more people. Which then made me just wonder, holy crap, what are we saying in the first sentence? And I think that's what started to get me down this road of, if those two words are that powerful, how powerful is the first sentence on the website? And that's where I started seeing what's happening with that, uh, messaging.

Speaker C: What do you think worked between book now and C days?

Speaker B: Uh, the old sales mentality of, uh, sell to the next step. We're not. We're not. I'm not booking. When I click that button, it's going to give me a calendar and let me choose the date that I need to choose. Don't. I'm not buying the ticket yet. I'm just going to choose the dates. Just sell to the next step. Get me to the next thing. And this is what we see on websites a lot as well. Uh, websites have changed. Websites used to be a digital storefront. It's what it grew from. This was my store in the late 90s, early 2000s. Great. This is our digital store. Come on in.

Speaker C: Shop around.

Speaker B: Choose your own adventure. What do you like? But now what we're seeing is that the most effective websites, the highest converting websites, act more like a digital salesperson than they do a digital store. And that salesperson is just selling you to the next step. I just need to get you on the phone. I just need to say enough to you to not satiate your curiosity either. How do I keep you curious enough to reach out and not even say too much that you're going to say, oh, I need to think about this more. So it all. It all has to get balanced in there.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Very similar to that adjacent possible concept and very obvious to why when I get super excited and I.

Speaker A: You start.

Speaker C: I start talking about, yeah, and you get to do this, and you get to this, and you get to this. You know, like, the confused mind doesn't buy. Right. So, like, the Idea of how to say just enough to move you along to the next step instead of, you know, all the things that you wish you could say. I feel like is, uh, is really, really valuable there. Is there a, is there a framework or a formula that you think of for this first sentence, man, like, do you have some kind of like, in your head, 30% logos, 30% pathos, 30% ethos or something like that? Is there anything like that?

Speaker B: Uh, no, no set formula on that side. So what happens is after we kind of get all the answers, we're doing that research, we pull it all in. We talked about that. Week four. Going through and molding it all and getting it together is. Then it's at that point that we're also looking for what does this need to be so we can go back through and start to pull out from the answers. Here's all the problems you solve, here's all the solutions you have that you can offer to someone. And we start to distill those things down and we start to say, here, here's the three problems I want you to talk about and here's the three solutions I want you to talk about.

Speaker A: And.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: That's it. This is your lane. If, uh, you stay in these lanes with these problems and these solutions, you're going to win. If you start drifting outside of those conversations, then we create more questions, then you're not positioned to win anymore inside those conversations. So let's just talk about the stuff you know best and stay in that lane.

Speaker C: You know, as I'm, um, as, as you're saying all this, I'm like, all right, this is exactly what you did with your business, right? Like, I, I feel, I feel like you went from like customer Persona research and all the stuff that's, you know, like it starts getting really, really daunting to one sentence on your website. Let's figure it out. And then you can walk in the door, do all the customer Persona stuff that you need to deliver this, like one thing that everybody freaking wants that then leads to, oh yeah, and by the way, now that you've worked with us, you understand that this thing works like this and this thing works like that and I can build you a whole website plus a bunch of other stuff. Is that kind of true?

Speaker B: Yep, spot on. Spot on. I needed something people could understand. And the difference between this is what the sentence was. This is what the sentence is. You can hear it. I've used some examples on you today. And you can hear the first sentence. You hear the second Sentence like, oh my God, that is quite different. And that's why I need, I needed that comprehension aspect of it that you, you know what I do, you know what you're getting when you work with, uh, us.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. All right, so talk to me once. All right, so, so first sentence is set. You know what else, what else do I need to know about deploying that first sentence?

Speaker B: Deploying it? Don't, uh, know yet. But by the time we finish working with someone. Yeah. So week four, you leave us alone. Week five, I present the new strategy and I present the new first sentence to you. Uh, with that, I make it a formal attire presentation as well. It's a big deal. In that meeting, I am fundamentally changing the way your company looks at generating revenue. Dress up, show up. This is a huge deal. So that's our week five meeting. Then in week six, we go back over that same presentation and then we say, okay, what are the five things we need to do next? And there's a company that we worked with that's, uh, a ballistics intelligence company that they process bullet casings to tell you what gun it came from. And some of the stuff they were doing around these online ads and these blogs weren't working. And they were confused as to why it wasn't working. And when we narrowed it down to 38 year old mark, who's a lieutenant at the local police department, he's not online. He's not spending time going and reading these blogs about this new technology or clicking on these ads that the simplest thing they could do was just start to do personal outreach to some of these local police departments and send them some lunch, send them a little brochure of what you do and actually get back into physical tactics. And that's, that's once we know that person as well, that then we can say, this is how we can win them.

Speaker C: I love that man. Um, I love how it opens the door. You know, you found the choke point of where everything else can then open up. Right. Um, that story that you're telling me reminds me of, um, my buddy Kurt, who is, uh, who I'm coaching right now, um, as he becomes marketing director of his company. They're h ah Vac products. I'm helping them with like a POV and all these different things. They wanted to launch a campaign to educate. They have a truly differentiated product, right? Like normally commercial, uh, H vac components. In order to change like a, like a fan array, you need to like, shut down the building for like a month and open up A wall and bring something in. A forklift. They have this thing that you can, like, carry in in an elevator. Shut down, you know, shut down. Just, like, one chiller for like, an hour or two or. Or half a Saturday. Be in and out. Really, really phenomenal. So they're trying to educate the Tampa market on. On this stuff. And he's like, man, I want to run a campaign. I'm thinking that I can run Facebook ads if I have this, like, video and this and that. I'm like, hey, man, how many, um. How many people do you need? Do you need to reach? She's like, like, a hundred. I'm like, so why would you want to run a Facebook ad when you can just look up the licenses of certified mechanical contractors in Tampa? You get a hundred addresses. You send them. You know, I had just received this, like, pair of socks from my buddy Dennis Yu, who has this company called Video, uh, Socks, where he sends you a pair of socks plus a postcard with a video in it. I'm like, send them a pair. Send, like, a hundred people a pair of socks with the video that you want them to see and a Facebook ad, bro. So. So the idea of just, like, if you know. If you know the intent, right. Like, if you know who the person is for and you know the. And you know, what you're trying to reach, that really just opens up the idea of you can truly be a strategist for somebody, um, as opposed to you have this, like, one thing that you do for everybody. You figured out the one thing you do for everybody as the way to find their strategic choke point.

Speaker B: Yep. And that's why when we get into all those details about, you know, what is the person drive to work, how long is their drive to work, is that then I want to get inside that situation where you picture that person sitting down at their desk with all the other shit they have going on in their day, and they see an ad or they get an email from you, why should they give a shit what you have to say? Because if we can figure that out, we can figure everything else out from there. If we can figure out why they would care about that email you sent, that message you sent, then it all works backwards.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I love it, man. I love it. Um, how do you ever work with, uh, extremely undifferentiated products? Like, what if someone's a life coach or a business coach or something like that, right? Like, how do you. How do you start? So, like, Pratiti saying, you know, this is exactly what she's been struggling with. It's what. What to say on the first page and her imagine page. Um, I know, but he's like, ah, she. She's a coach and a realtor and she hosts these women, these women's retreats. Um, how would you. How would you begin to kind of like, whittle that stuff down?

Speaker B: Uh, it's still. That the formula is still the same of who's the person, what problem do they have? How do you solve that problem? And this is where, yeah, between all the companies we've worked across my national opioid rehabilitation facility, all the way back into cannabis and then back through fractional CFOs, like, it's still the same formula. It's super old. I didn't invent this either. I'm just gonna throw that one out there. This is. We can go all the way back to the early 1900s with a man named Claude Hopkins, who is considered one of the grandfathers of advertising. And one of his big sayings was, we need to learn how to win one before we can go after thousands m. And it's that concept. I need one person all the way through. So even for Petiti, we need to figure out who is that one person that she's going to love first. And I do. I do have some criteria to help with that. We can. We can talk a little bit about some of the criteria for figuring out that first person. Would that be helpful?

Speaker C: Yeah, that'd be super helpful.

Speaker B: Oh, all right. All right. Pretty. Anyone else is listening? So here are the six things that I want you to think about with that first person. Uh, first thing I want you to look at. How much does it cost to acquire that person? We want to go through people we can actually get a hold of, who's in our network. Who can we actually get in touch and get in front of to begin with? Then I want to figure out of those people, who's going to spend the most with you per transaction. Then I want to decide who's going to have the highest lifetime value, which is in that similar set. I want to pick someone who has the best referral network. How can I just pick this person who's going to tell five more people, don't let me pick the loaner. Who's going to be alone and not tell anyone else about me? Who's got the referral network? Uh, I want to know who's going to benefit the most from this. There's someone maybe like you, if you built it for yourself, but who's going to benefit the most. And my last criteria is someone you enjoy working with. Pick someone you'd actually want to hang out with and let's try to win that person. Let's plan to win the people we really want because we're probably still going to win the people we don't want. Those, those ones are still going to come in anyways. Let's plan for the ones that we really want to work with.

Speaker C: It's almost like, um, it's almost like the Dream 100 concept, but the dream one, it's who is right. If you're gonna, if you're gonna zero in on one Persona, it's uh, just really understand all the, all the things that could really work.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: So like if I'm, if I'm thinking about Pratiti, I'm thinking, you know, she is in, she's in the outskirts of Philadelphia, right. So, um, and is hosting these female retreats on top of doing this like, coaching stuff. So it's probably um, ah, a female in her maybe like early 50s, late 40s, something like that that is in right now. Maybe her kids are. Her kid. Her, her. Her kid is about to go to college. She only has one child, um, and therefore a bunch of disposable income because not a million kids. And that kid is going to college. She's looking for a new identity at that moment after working for um, you know, a specific. As at a law firm or something like that, or as an architect or. Or something like that isn't having it and therefore, you know, needs some like, guidance on something like that. Maybe she's, she's also gone through a recent tragedy in her life as well. Um, you know, like these kinds of things that are, that are very.

Speaker B: I'm.

Speaker C: I'm trying to get like as specific as possible. Maybe she's also a child of immigrants, um, which also comes with ah, a. With a wide set of like a network and stuff like that. Um, I don't know.

Speaker A: M. Man.

Speaker C: What else?

Speaker B: What.

Speaker C: How help me spitball here.

Speaker B: It becomes a cloud of information about that person.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And this is where there's the step then after that where I need to like, yes, this is the state she's in. These are the things she's feeling. But um, I need to get back into what problem does she have. And that's what I really want to latch onto. I want to know, uh, when she wakes up and goes through her day, what are some of the things that she's doing during her day? And then as you think about it, While she's, you know, she's checking emails and she's getting this like, great, then what problems come up from that? Then look to say, great, here's. Here's the problem. I'm an attack. This is the one I'm going to go all in on.

Speaker A: Awesome.

Speaker C: Joe. Um, what else, man? What have I not asked you so far? This has been awesome.

Speaker B: Like, I'm.

Speaker C: I'm a little bit hypnotized by all your movement and your good looks and all this stuff.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: So, like, if you can. If you can help me out, like, I feel like you got this.

Speaker B: Oh, hey, hey. All right, all right. Keep pg. Keep it pg. Uh, I mean, there's. There's. I have a bunch of resources on our site, so@martinchicago.com, if you go all the way down to the bottom, you'll see our blog, and inside there are the six requirements for choosing or six ways to identify your first customer. There's, uh, six problems with the first sentence on your website is on there as well, so you can look for some of those. And then we even give some examples of first sentences on your websites with, here's what the sentence was. Here's why it wasn't working. Here's the new sentence. Here's why it works so, so much in there that I'm trying to educate where I can to really help people make this change. Because it's. It's. It's a need now like this. We were able to kind of lay back with messaging, I think, over the past few years, because we're still growing. You still have new companies coming online, starting to take some market share and advertise. But now you need to stand out. You cannot afford to have the same messaging, to have bland, generic messaging, because there's too much competition. It's too easy to see anyone else who's out there.

Speaker C: Excellent, bro. Excellent. All right, man. I'm gonna start, uh, letting people in for the open mic sesh where everybody just kind of joins. Yeah, I would love to have you hang out. If you got to go do something, that's cool too. But, um, I think it's going to be a ton of value. In the meantime, man, how do people. You said the martinchicago.com 6 Ways to Identify your target customer. I'm going to. I shared it in the. You shared in the chat. I shared in the chat. We're going to link to it in the show notes. Uh, beyond that, man, how do people get a hold of you? How do people reach out to Connect. Do you want more friends?

Speaker B: I mean, I got maybe a few more friends. Just every person comes with their own drama. But, uh, no, absolutely. So, Joe Martin, Chicago.com best way to get a hold of me. So email, reach out. Happy to get on the phone to see if there's something we can do about your first sentence, even if it's just kind of pushing you in the right direction, nudging you the right way and get people going. This is because I guess my big thing here is, uh, ultimately. So Pablo, I don't think we've talked about this before, that I do the weird thing with my company that for the past six years, we work for six weeks and then we take off for two. And so this is why the whole business model is built around getting this first sentence done in six weeks as well. And ultimately what I want to see is when we adjust that first sentence, it wastes less money in other places that the, uh, better your messaging, the shorter your sales process. And if that sales process is shorter and people can understand more what you do, there's savings to be had in the company. And my hope is that if companies start really taking the time to fall in love with that target customer, to get the right messaging, that that same mindset shifts back to employees and that we can start looking at how to run companies that give people more time in their day and have a little more flexibility with what they're doing. And some of that empathy that I think needs to exist in business that just hasn't been existing in business for a long time because those two words don't go together. You need to be able to just cut someone off if they're not doing well and move your business along because profit, profit, profit, growth, growth, growth. And I think that we need to bring just a little bit of that empathy back and start caring about the people that we bring into our organizations.

Speaker C: I love it, man. Thank you for, thank you for that. Thanks for coming on. Right. Like, I, um, I think from the moment we, we met at Justin Breen's launch event in Chicago, table of like four super smart guys. Um, and uh, from, from the first moment, just kind of like your energy and your enthusiasm really just stood out. And I've really just the more I get to know you, the more, um, in awe of you I am. From your Instagram account where you are singing, uh, Kanye west covers on an acoustic guitar bars, to just the way that you have evolved through this messaging message, which I think is very impressive as a messaging nerd myself, to this idea of, you know, having a truly differentiated business model that you get to work for four weeks and take two weeks off, man, I think that it's just like such a superhuman achievement, um, that I, that I'm, ah, that I'm in awe of man. And I'm just like, happy that we get to be friends. And I'm pumped that you did this with me again, man. So thanks. Thanks for doing this again, sweetheart.

Speaker B: You're such a sweet man. Pablo, thank you for having me and for you for doing this. That I think that, uh, it's important to get these kind of messages out there to share this kind of stuff. And it takes creators like you who are dedicated to getting these stories, working with people like me that otherwise someone wouldn't have heard of, and that I kind of operate just a little bit under the radar with the stuff we're doing here in Chicago. But for you to be able to pull it out and make some of these things more present, more public for other people to understand, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. Thank you.

Speaker C: Awesome, buddy. Well, uh, that's the end of season five of the B2B Community Builder Show.

Speaker A: All right. That dude's awesome. Total man crush. Not gonna lie. So here's the deal. What's coming next? Great question. As you know, I'm obsessed with category design, and I'm launching a community for category designers@categorythinkers.com it's gonna be that place to take people from the category curious to the category capable. And, you know, Christopher Lockhead's behind it, uh, Al Ramadan, all the Play Bigger guys are behind it. I'm partnering with my friends Mike Damp House, who is the partner of Kevin Maney at Category Design Advisors, and my good buddy John Ruggie, who is another one of the foremost thought leaders in category design. Been publishing content on it for years now. And we are creating this community that I'd love to have you be a part on. In the meantime, I am, um, really focusing my efforts there. While I have downsized my company. Right. I have essentially just figured out that I want to grow inside of my client base and, um, really add a ton of value in that way. It's been a profound experience for me to understand that I much rather build a customer intimacy model than like a giant production capacity model. And took me a little while to understand it. Now that I understand it, took me a little while to implement it. Um, it's been an amazing, amazing experience with everybody from my team that I've called out to here over the years. Um, but sadly they're all kind of moving on to their next things. Except for ah, ah, JP and uh, and me, right. We're, we're staying together here. So what does it mean for the show? For the show? It means that I'm going to focus my content more on what I'm learning inside my clients themselves. I've realized that I've treated myself as a client for a long time and that has given me the insights of how to serve my clients better. Now that I am just going really deep into their strategies, I'm starting to really understand what the person that can benefit from the stuff that we do here is like, who they are and how they actually benefit from this stuff by being able to tweak the different strategies in that context. So, um, I've realized that that is the evangelist CEO, right? That person that founded their company based on this problem that they want to solve this mission that they're on. They've built a company around this mission. They're missionaries, not mercenaries. And what they're trying to do is get that message, get that, get that care for the problem out there as much as possible. And the way that they do that uh, is, you know, the thing that they've been struggling with, right? Whether it's growing a salesforce and not being able to train everybody exactly on message or you know, things like, like that, that's the stuff that I'm really helping on right now. So if you're that kind of person, that's, that's the type of content that's coming here soon. In the meantime, this, uh, feed will stay active and it's not going to be these long form interviews. It's going to be insights that I'm getting from being inside the guts of my clients right now that hopefully will be action things that you can implement yourself. So stay tuned for now. After that, uh, does it become an another live show again? Does it become a interview style show? All that stuff is uncertain. But for right now you're just going to get a bunch of like really actionable current aha moments that I'm having as we tweak content strategy, communication strategy, um, trade show stuff, activations, right? Like basically the intersection between making content and building relationships and building a company in order to scale your message as an evangelist CEO that really cares about a specific type of problem or specific type of person, um, and by doing so you care about everybody around you. So stay tuned for all that stuff. I love you for having been a part of this journey so far. And, uh, I'll see you soon. You can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. In the meantime, remember that relationships will always beat transactions. See ya.