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Episode #243
Michael F. Schein

How To Create Undeniable "Hype" Around Your Consulting Services

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Summary

Are you equipped with a good amount of knowledge and skills for your services? In today’s episode, Michael Shein, founder of MicroFame Media, shares his insights on how you can create undeniable hype around your consulting services. He had gone through different jobs in his career, and through these experiences, he was able to sort of analyze and reflect on things that are effective when marketing yourself or your business. He even discusses hype strategies to grow your influence and business, especially in today’s modern time, using different platforms and technologies. Stay tuned for more!

I’m glad to be joined by Michael F. Schein. Michael, welcome.

It’s so great to be here.

Michael, you are the President of MicroFame Media. You’re a writer and a speaker. You’ve worked with clients like The Medici Group, the University of Pennsylvania, and a bunch of tech companies over the years. You also write for publications like Fortune, Forbes, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today. You’re the author of the book, The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets from the World’s Greatest Propagandist, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers. You were kind enough to send me a copy of your book and I enjoyed it. We’re going to dive into some of those principles and how the community of consultants here can benefit from them.

Before we get into how people can scale their business and position themselves as recognized experts in their industry and in their niche, you got started way back in the day. Even before you got involved in consulting and running your own media business, you had a lot of different types of jobs. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like, bouncing around from different jobs? What was your experience before you figured out, “This is what I’m good at. This is what I should do.”

Most business owners, especially entrepreneurs have a bit of a zigzag path and that was me. I never wanted to be involved in the business at all. I was always interested in ideas, which is why I ended up working with consultants. Consultants are not in the business of selling ideas. I was always coming up with crazy ideas and they had nothing to do with businesses. I wasn’t one of those guys who was selling baseball cards in the back of the school. I was coming up with novels, band ideas, board games, and all of this stuff.

After college, I told my parents at the graduation dinner as they loved brunch. They loved to remind me that I was going to go to New York. What I cared about was starting a band and revolutionizing rock and roll. It was 1999, which was a pretty bad year for rock and roll. You could see why I thought I might be able to do that. They weren’t happy. They were like, “Do you sing well?” I was like, “Not really.” They were like, “Are you a good guitar player?” I was like, “Not really,” but that’s what I decided to do.

We did better than anyone thought we would do. We certainly didn’t make it at the end, which was pretty tough. We used to sell this club out in Arlene’s Grocery on a regular basis. We had a residency there. We were on TV once. We had a lot of fans. The way we make that happen is we hype up the show. We never knew from marketing that it was a business term, but we would do all kinds of crazy antics to hype up the show. That didn’t end up working out.

The band broke up as bands do, and I needed a job. I got this job at a company that had a big parent company that operated call centers. The founder was always starting these side businesses. They brought me in to start this entertainment business, which failed heavily. I did an okay job there. They shifted me into the call center business. Ten years later, I was a senior vice president at a contact center industry.

At that time, I was hating my life. It was cool in the beginning because I was learning some things, but I felt that I was trapped. From there, long story, I got the courage together to become a business copywriter. I was a freelance writer. I had to figure out how to attract attention. Marketing didn’t help me. Learning all the marketing technology did nothing for me. I looked back to my band days and thought about how I used to hype up things, and how there may be a difference between hype and marketing. When I took that mindset, it slowly but surely evolved into the business I have now.

I want to get into the word hype because it has such a negative connotation for so many people. Before we do that, let’s go back in time. Your parents are sitting down having that brunch. They’re saying, “Are you crazy?” You want to go to New York and start a rock band. Looking back on that, as a parent, for those that have kids that are joining us, would you handle that situation differently if you were the parent in that situation? What do you think is the lesson learned for those that have younger kids who want to do something that to the parent might seem crazy?

CSP 243 | Hype

 

I think about this a lot because I used to buy into the romantic vision that whatever your kids want you to do, it’s their dream and you should do that. At the same time, I was lucky that I got out. I learned lessons, but I was smart enough or scared enough after a couple of years of doing that and realizing that I wasn’t making it happen financially. We had a following that I wasn’t making a living. I know a number of people who have this one dream. I want to write abstract novels, play garage rock music, and nothing else will satisfy me. You look at them in their 40, 45, even sometimes 50 years old and they’re living a tough life because they’re so hyper fixated on that dream.

Parents don’t always have the answer and every situation is different. What I would say to my kid is to give it a shot but try to keep your eyes open for unintended consequences. It’s that hyper fixation that not having a plan B that celebrities always talk about. That’s a bit of a survivorship bias because they’re the ones who make it, whereas most people without a plan B are just broke.

Let’s fast forward to your time of being a copywriter and want to start to build that into a career. You spend a lot of time and energy learning and studying the typical status quo approach to marketing, which was not working for you. You went back to thinking about your days in the rock band and how hype plays a role in the success of many rock bands as well as many other areas of the world, organizations and businesses.

Why don’t we first explore what the word hype means? For many people, especially in this social media age that we’re in, hype is everywhere. Hype is a negative thing. People who hype themselves, typically it’s all about ego, fancy cars and airplanes. Talk a bit about what is hype in your mind? What do you think about hype and its power of it for businesses?

It’s a key question, especially about what I do. It’s one of those words that doesn’t have a set definition. In a lot of communities, especially the word you’re talking about. What it means is drumming up a lot of smoke and attention around something where the stuff itself isn’t really good. For that reason, I was almost not going to call the book the Hype Handbook. Something changed my mind.

You can suss out that I’m a music fan, but there’s one community where hype is a positive word and it’s hip hop. If you rap music, which many people do, we can say that the rap groups or rappers who are producing records are creating a good product. People listen to those songs and like the songs. In the hip hop world, even the best rappers are always talking about hype.

A lot of rap groups, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s had a hype man whose specific role was to drive a lot of energy and a lot of attention to the band and get the energy of the crowd up. That was a distinct part of the group. I don’t want to assume anything about you. People like us have relatively stable upbringing and some opportunities.

We think of hype often as a negative thing because we have other channels. We’re firmly in the center of the conversation even though we’ve worked hard and struggled. If you follow the rules and do A, B, C, and D, you’ll probably get E. Whereas if rap was born in the South Bronx, it’s the most economically disadvantaged area in the country. They’re making music out of the trash and out of discarded records from castaway bins. They did something beautiful depending on what your tastes are.

They don’t have the luxury to market or sell things. They hype things up. The way I define hype is any set of activities that creates a large amount of emotion among a large number of people to get them to take that specific action. That action can be a negative action. It can be a positive action. In a lot of cases that I’ve studied, even though I look at some terrible people, hype adds color to the work itself. Without Flavor Flav, Public Enemy wouldn’t be as good.

It’s a great explanation and so true. In the consulting business, you have to market yourself. You have to put yourself out there. If you’re not visible and you’re not known, you could be the best at what you do, but no one would even know that you exist. Whether you call that marketing, promotion, business development or hype, it’s still part of getting the story out there and making sure that people know about you. Let’s go back to your early days. You started copywriting and building the business. I would love to even get more into MicroFame Media as your company. How how did you go about getting your first few clients in those days?

With a hype mindset, it will surely evolve your business. Click To Tweet

I had a great idea for a business that was a terrible idea. It was good on paper. I was in the call center industry, not telemarketing. It’s the BPO industry. They call it Business Process Outsourcing. We would answer the phones for large corporations. It’s a large industry. It’s one of those, not underground industries, but industries that don’t have a lot of glamor around it that’s a multibillion-dollar industry.

I directly reported to the CMO by the end of my time there. We were always looking for writers who understood the business and telecom because that was another side of what we did. I ended up always writing a lot of this stuff. I could have used the help. My business plan was, “There’s this niche. I’ll become a white paper writer, a case study writer, and a web copywriter for the BPO industry. I’ll do well because I’m a good writer. People in that industry will hire me.”

I got one client that was in that industry and that was it. I couldn’t get clients in that industry. I got hired quickly. My sister worked in an SEO company that went from 5 employees to 150 employees that needed web copy done. They paid me $500 to do that, so I could expand my portfolio. After that, I didn’t do too well. Once in a while, I would get clients but I had a year’s worth of savings here and there. I have clients but I wasn’t succeeding. I’m a good writer. Everyone I worked with would hire me again when they needed the job, but it is project-based. I have many things I’m bad at in this world, but writing isn’t one of them.

I was about ready to give up. I was upset. It wasn’t a function of the cream rising to the top. We hear this thing like a lot of consultants feel that they don’t have to market themselves because their ideas are so good. I did want to market myself. I read every marketing book that there was. I took classes. I almost got Google Analytics certified, but realized it wasn’t helping me after a while. The whole thing didn’t do much for me. I was doing all of the activities. I had this revelation that I don’t like the word marketing anymore because what it means to most people is pushing the right buttons. It shouldn’t mean that.

When you talk to someone about marketing, they’ll say things to you like, “I’ve posted blogs four times a week. I keep our content calendar. I’m building lots of inbound links. I’m using ClickFunnels to build sales funnels.” They’ll say, “What’s the psychology behind that? How are you getting large numbers of people to take action?” It’s like blog posting four times a week or podcasting. It made a lot more sense for me to think about those levers in the human psyche, especially in groups that get people to take action.

I would write articles and pick fights with prominent gurus, not in a trolling way. I would see all of the bad advice in the world that I wanted to reach. I would systematically dismantle these gurus and show how the way they structured sales arguments got people to take action even if it wasn’t good for them. Those gurus would respond to me directly. All of these people who secretly felt the same way I did would be like, “You’re a smart guy. The emperor’s got no clothing and you called it out.” We would have a conversation. Before long, they would be hiring me to do the same thing for them.

That’s not marketing. I used the internet, that’s marketing. It should be marketing, but people don’t think of that as marketing. I thought people love adversarial dynamics. What if I tapped into that? I made this distinction in my mind between what are those strategies that could work, whether using scrolls, printing presses or Twitter and then what are those “marketing things,” which is more of a distribution channel? That was my own dynamic, and then I started applying that vocabulary to the people I worked with.

I want to get deeper into all that. Before we go there though, I’m taking a step back. Why do you think that did not work for you? Here you are, very knowledgeable about studying marketing at a high level, and what works for others. You made an attempt. You got a little bit of success here and there. Some projects are coming your way, but they didn’t click. Looking back now many years later over the actions that you took, and the mindset that you had, what was the core reason that you didn’t see success with the actions you took originally?

Do you remember about eight years ago or so blogging was the biggest thing in marketing? Every single person had a blog. I did a talkback then to a bunch of entrepreneurs, usually, entrepreneurs who probably had about 5 to 10 employees. They’re successful but not massive. There must have been 100 people in the room. I said, “How many people here have tried to blog for their business?” I estimate about 55 people raise their hands. I said, “How many people here have made $1 from their marketing efforts?”

I didn’t know what the response would be, but I had a feeling zero people raised their hands. I think that I was falling into the trap that so many of us do. You read business books, especially if you’re a lifelong learner or someone who thinks that you can educate yourself out of any problem. The internet runs on content. If you’re consistent with your content and have a call to action, that will work. You make a content calendar. You put up four blog posts a week. You always have a call to action. Why does that work?

CSP 243 | Hype

 

We often don’t think about that. It’s a magic pill, this idea that having the content and having the call action will work. What a lot of people do who sell internet marketing services, and they don’t articulate this well, is they think about the psychology first and then match it to the technology. Russell Brunson owns ClickFunnels, which is probably the premier technology tool for selling online courses. It’s a good technology tool. His sales pitch is, “If you buy this tool and you follow exactly what I say, set up this thing called a stack benefits presentation, and put a little clock on there to create scarcity, and then have a form that you fill out, you’ll succeed.”

Everyone is doing the same thing. You have no competitive advantage. If you look at what Russell Brunson is doing, he’s a hype man. I mean that in a positive way. He has created a persona that makes him seem larger than life. He creates a lot of aspirational energy. If people would watch what he did versus what he teaches, they would do a lot better. I was following the rule books.

Michael, back in those days, you were doing the things that “gurus” said you should be doing, write the blog post, have the links for the SEO stuff and so on, but there was no real strategy. You were busy doing the tactics, but you didn’t have a clear step-by-step of how it all comes together.

A psychology-based strategy, that’s the difference. You can have a technology strategy or an analytic strategy but if you don’t think about that core irrational way that human beings make decisions, for me and for many of the people I talk to, and for that 100 people who blog like crazy and didn’t get a result, it doesn’t work. Especially consultants because they know exactly what you said. Being good at what I do is almost the least important element. It’s so amorphous. How do you demonstrate that? I need to generate this energy and emotion around what I do.

They do all this tactical marketing. If you look at the mid-level consultants who are generating attention, they are showmen. They understand. Tom Peters is constantly calling people out in the audience to generate that little bit of discomfort that we know. There have been scientific papers written on the neurology of why injecting a little bit of pain into an otherwise pleasurable situation creates a bond. Tom Peters inherently gets that. It doesn’t matter what marketing tactics he’s using.

You start to make a name for yourself by identifying visible authorities, experts or leaders and calling them out on something that you felt strongly against. You would see something that didn’t jive with you. You would be visible and vocal about that. That’s polarization at its best. Polarization in the marketing world is powerful. You push away some people, but you attract others. Talk to us a little bit more about maybe one example in your book

You talk about Gary Vaynerchuk and you call him out on his hustle mindset of mentality. If you want to lead with that one or if there’s maybe even a better example so that people can see. What are the steps that you took? At a high level of view, summarize, “Here’s what I saw first, then here’s what I did. Here was the result.” Can you walk us through one of those examples?

Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example. He’s one of those people that in some audiences, he’s Elvis and then in other spaces, he’s nothing. Nobody knows what he does. He’s a true micro-celebrity. In my world, he’s certainly a big deal. In some ways, he’s the preeminent social media personal branding internet guru. I have nothing but respect for him in a lot of ways. It’s nothing personal. He’s a great businessman. He had this business called Wine Library, Wine Library TV. He took his father’s wine distribution business, which did about $3 million a year in revenue. That is a good starting place, but he turned it into a massive company.

The way he did that was he created this internet TV show called Wine Library TV. He presented wine in this down-to-earth, bro-y way because that’s his persona. He would come unshaven in a hoodie and describe wine like cinnamon toast crunch, and fruit loops and curse a lot. That was unheard of. It built this big following and he did well with that. Because that was so successful, people wanted to know how he marketed things so well on the internet. He built this career that he’s known as being this guru around promoting yourself online. His whole shtick is hustle. He’s had to ramp this down a little lately because the world has changed.

When I wrote this article, he would get up on stage and would say using curse words, “I get up in the middle of the night at 3:00 in the morning with my phone. I’m on the toilet and I go to the bathroom,” but he didn’t say to the bathroom. “I’m tweeting while I’m going to the bathroom because that’s how hard you have to work on the internet or on social media to be successful. If you’re not doing that, it’s cool that you want a cubicle job, but that’s all you will get.”

Hype adds color to the work itself. Click To Tweet

I would listen to this and think to myself, “Something about this doesn’t sit right.” It’s one thing if you’re marketing or selling the wine, but what if you’re making the wine? What if you own a vineyard? Should you be spending all your time tweeting about the vineyard or should you be trying to make better wine? It’s also a terrible way to live. The only one who seemed to be getting rich was Gary. He has all these fans and most of them are young men. I don’t know any Elon Musks coming out of the rank of Vaynerchuk fans.

I started to do some research on cults. One thing that almost all religious cults have in common is that they get their followers to work hard for salvation. What it does is it bonds the cult leader to the followers because there’s a sunk cost dynamic happening. If you’ve worked hard on behalf of a movement and then you start to have doubts about that movement, it’s tough to have internal continuity in your head and say, “I wasted my time for years for this thing,” so you double down.

I took him to task for that. I had an ulterior motive. The way I did copywriting is I would sell packages of my writing after a while. I would write a lot of material quickly. Sometimes I would give the team or the client the templates for doing it after I left, which was a higher price point. I did a bunch of case studies for Magento, which was the basis of their early marketing campaign when they got serious and brought in a head of product. I built their template for producing case studies to drive leads. I was all about systemization.

When you say you took Gary the task, specifically, what did you do?

My ulterior motive was I wanted to show that a systemized approach was better than a brute force approach. I wrote an article in Inc., which I happened to write for the time that said Why Gary Vaynerchuk Is Flat Out Wrong. If you read the article, it’s still out there. I am nothing but complimentary. I talk about how he was a great business person, etc., but then I say the idea of working around the clock is not sustainable. It benefits Gary more than the people listening.

I don’t think anything of it. I wasn’t far along in my career yet. I was a little bit scared to send it, but the bands I played in were punk bands. I always had that punk rock attitude of, “Let’s do this,” even though it’s scary and offended people a little bit. That night, Gary himself made a video talking about me by name. He went off for 30 minutes talking about this article and he started off very respectful. By the end, he was agitated because no one ever calls this guy out or didn’t then.

My phone started blowing up. All of his fans started lambasting me. They were calling me lazy, which was funny because I had never worked so hard in my life as I was during this time, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m an idiot, I’m destined to be poor forever, etc. I thought that was it. I woke up the next morning and there were 50 new Twitter followers, then 100, and then 300. It turned out there were all of these people out there who were hearing this message that it didn’t resonate with them.

It does resonate with a lot of people. They were the ones who called me out. Now there was someone who stepped forward and said, “I’m against this way of looking at the world.” They now have a leader. They can define themselves against the hustle mentality in an organized way. I started to build the following. People started to read my articles a lot more. I started to get client calls. I started writing more articles like that. It was very successful and profitable for me.

Michael, I appreciate you sharing that example. If we were to take the situation of a consultant who’s reading this going, “That makes sense. I may or may not feel comfortable with the idea of doing something like that, where it is creating some conflict.” Put that aside for a moment. You had the benefit of a connection, a relationship with Inc., which is the platform you were writing for.

If somebody is reading this now and they are saying, “I like this idea. There are mindsets, concepts or established ways of doing things that I don’t agree with in my industry. I see an opportunity to speak up against that and therefore get the power of polarization happening. I don’t have the connection with Inc. or with an established platform to get my ideas out there.” What would your advice be to them? How could they use the power of this concept even if they don’t have an established platform?

CSP 243 | Hype

 

The established platform I had is a little deceptive and it leads to another hype strategy. Bear with me while I get to the center of this concept because it’s key. The reason I had that Inc. column early in my career was because I wanted to write a column. I was not having a lot of luck at all. I worked at a place at the time called the Brooklyn Writers Space. If you know Parks Slope, Brooklyn, there were a lot of writers there, very writerly area. It’s this place that as long as you’re a serious writer, you can write out of there. Serious doesn’t mean published. It means that you’re taking it seriously.

Jonathan Lethem, a huge novelist, wrote out of there at a time, but also just random journalists and things. There was this woman, Diane, who changed my life. We were friends because we were part of this community. I overheard her talking one day about how she was overwhelmed because she was doing work for Inc. and now all of the editors were responsible for finding writers to write for free. She knows where she was going to find people. I said, “I’ll do it.” She said, “You have to apply.” I said, “I have a blog. I’ll send in some of my blog samples.” I sent in the blog samples and they brought me on.

My point in bringing this up is that there’s another hype strategy. There are 12 hype strategies in the book, and 12 hype strategies in our work. The first one is the idea of make war not love, pick a fight. The second one is called build a secret society. All great hype artists make it seem like their success is grassroots. It bubbles up and comes out of nowhere or that they built a platform organically and made it happen. What almost all of them do, if not all of them, is that they simultaneously work beneath the surface to create a cabal of people around them that will pull strings for them.

The way to do that is the look for things that are cheap for you to give up. I don’t mean financially but is easy or doable for you to give up that are valuable to other people, and to go into communities where there’s a dense group of the people you want them to meet. I worked at this Brooklyn Writers Space. It was easy to work there. All you had to do was pay a fee and show that you were interested. I was in the right location, Brooklyn.

When I overheard Diane talking about a problem she had, I could have said, “That seems like a pain in the neck to do free writing. I need to be paid for my writing.” It was cheap for me to do. I wasn’t doing a lot of work because I wasn’t doing well in my career at that time. I gave that to her and I solved a big problem for her. What I would recommend is to put yourself in communities where there’s a high density of people that can make things happen for you. Benevolently stalk them to see if there are things that you can connect around or common interest.

You can do this on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit or in person. I call this personal arbitrage. When you find an opportunity to do something that would be meaningful for them but pretty doable for you to do, jump on that. If you can help someone’s kids or if you can make an introduction that’s not one of these networking introductions where you throw five random introductions at people, but it’s something that you heard them talking about that could get them a job, that would change their life, but it’s your best friend and there’s no social capital that you’re expending, do it. If you’re constantly keeping your eyes open for that and you do that on a regular basis, you will be well-positioned to accelerate your platform quickly when you need to.

Let’s transition into your company and the work that you’re doing as well as how you got to where you are. To begin with the structure of the company, is there a team that’s involved? What does that look like? Walk us through the structure of the company as it sits now.

We finally landed on a business model that is the most fun I’ve ever had at our company. It’s almost like we cracked this puzzle. After the copywriting business, a lot of people wanted the “marketing” that got me the clients because I would talk about it a lot. I hadn’t formulated my ideas on hype yet, but I was good at this thing that I was still thinking of as marketing. I started to bring on clients to do that and that became the bulk of my business.

For quite a few years, it was at least structurally an agency. We had our own way of doing things. We used these mass psychology principles, but we would promote ourselves, find clients, and do a sales proposal. They would come on in a retainer agreement. We would be responsible for doing the work for them. We would set up goals. We would run whatever tactical programs would execute this strategy. As a result, I had a sizable team. We had social media experts. We had project managers. We had all of this stuff.

After a period of time, especially when I started solidifying my ideas around hype and starting to write the book, I realized that we were doing our clients a disservice. Not only is that a high overhead model. I have selfish reasons for wanting to have changed the model. If a client throws money at a problem and says, “You’re an expert in marketing, go market me,” there’s this weird dynamic where they relinquish any involvement.

The internet runs on content. So if you're consistent with your content and have a call to action, that will work. Click To Tweet

They might micromanage you. They might try to tell you what to do when it’s a weird relationship. There are certain kinds of clients. For the most part, this happens to me. Especially when you’re dealing with personal branding, hype, driving a lot of attention around ideas or whatever you want to call it, it’s challenging when the client doesn’t show up in the same way that you’re promoting them. You go out there and run these campaigns. Let’s say you have this light edgy branding for them, then they show up dressed like a schlub, talking about outside the box solutions and win-win engagements. You have a total disconnect. It doesn’t ring true.

There’s also this hedonic treadmill that happens where you can get the best results in the world for a client and they’ll be happy for two months, then the new baseline is that new thing. You keep a lot of difficult conversations as you navigate how to get the results. We made a great living like that. We had a lot of great engagements. At a certain point I realized, “What if I tried to weave this new concept of hype into our client’s DNA? What if I tried to arm them so that they were not only getting the results but that they started to think as a hype artist?”

What we started to do first with a few clients and now with everybody because it’s better for them, is that we do gambits or experiments. We go hype principle by hype principle. We inculcate them so that they truly understand this hype principle. We’re using some tools. We’ve designed these sophisticated hype gambits. By sophisticated, it’s not just blog four times a week. It’s doing something that makes you stand out or that pushes those psychological buttons the target market has.

They have to go out and put one foot in front of the other to do the work, but they come back and we’re constantly redesigning the gambit or the experiment until the whole company becomes a hype machine. It’s this strange mix of a consultancy think tank and a marketing agency. That model has changed everything. Our clients have become much more successful. They view the world as hype artists. There’s this downward trickle effect where they teach their team members whenever they are working on a new product. Think about how you’re talking about the product. Think about how you’re showing up.

Has that changed the structure of your company and the number of people you have?

We don’t have a lot of full-time people anymore. Michalowicz once said, “The old definition of success was having a large team and a large office space. Now, it’s having a small team, a small office space, and lots of profits.” It was hard for me to let go of having that large team because I considered that a marker of success. We eventually streamline things and as a result, have better results and are more profitable.

With that, give me a sense of your typical engagement. Is it 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 or 1 million? Where do your typical engagements sit with clients? Is there a progression of a shift in how that works?

People often ask me this and I talk in terms of averages because it depends on the engagement. I would say that our average investment from clients sits around 5,000 a month or around that. It’s interesting because theoretically, a client should be able to work with us for a year and have what they do so deeply embedded in their DNA that they can then move on, and sometimes they do. What we found is interesting.

Once we figure out what is that combination of hype strategies that works, then it’s about making sure that it scales up, it rolls out, it’s maintained, and you’re building on it. Every marketing, hype or promotional strategy eventually dies because people get used to it. We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that clients have kept us on an ongoing basis to keep working with them. That’s the average service spend per month.

You mentioned you have different price points around that level. Has the pricing strategy or the structure that you use for pricing changed over time? Anything that you’ve learned didn’t work for you or works better for you now?

CSP 243 | Hype

 

It’s an age-old question. When you’re selling services, it’s not as simple as like, “My materials are this much. Let’s figure out what I’m going to sell it for.” I’ve struggled with it a lot. When I had a team, I had to set a certain price in order to make it worth our while as a company because you have payroll. I still have a team but it’s so bare-bones now. The team is completely involved in making the operations run like we have an office manager. I say like because we don’t have an office anymore, an office manager type role/project manager. We have an experienced designer like the curriculum designer.

Those account executives who run marketing for people, we don’t have to bake that overhead or that variable cost in anymore. I try to think about, “What’s the value we’re providing? What is that amount of money that’s fair?” I ask myself the question, “What would I resent having to work on this project and have my teamwork on it for?” They’re getting so much out of it that charging them this amount of money, I would resent working on it. I’ve had the luxury to be able to structure my pricing that way in a way that when I had a big, fat, massive team, I wasn’t able to do

Have there been any changes to how you structured the actual engagements? You went from the agency model to now more of like it’s “done with you.” You provide recommendations. Do you give a program? You provide advice, but the client is the one doing a lot of the work and you support them through that. Are there any big changes? Is there anything that happened over the last 6 to 12 months or even before that from a service offering perspective that has been a big learning for you?

The reason I said that everything clicked into place more than anything else is that I can now offer our services and deliver those services with the exact same structure that I presented in the beginning. When MicroFame Media was more of an agency, you have to get results and the results are on you. You can have all of the best-laid plans. I could say to you, “I’m going to market your business. Here’s the game plan that we’re going to use. We’re going to do this in week 1 of month 1, then we’re going to roll out this social media program,” etc.

You’re essentially their outsourced marketing department. What happens is either you have to adjust in the beginning because you’re dealing with human beings and you don’t know what’s going to work. The client gets nervous and starts trying to direct you, or you’re successful early and they get used to that. They start saying, “Where are the new ideas? What are the new suggestions?” The way that I was able to win in that chaotic environment was becoming chaotic.

A client would say to me, “What are your new ideas?” I’m full of ideas. I would give them new ideas that had nothing to do with what we started with that. Now I’m running around like a chicken without a head implementing these new ideas. A client is starting to mistrust what we’re doing even though it has only been a few weeks and there’s no rational reason to mistrust us. What do I do? I start taking assignments from them. I should never do that.

I had a client who was giving our account manager assignments like he was her employee. I had to tell her to stop doing that. She hung up the phone on me. I’ve tried a million ways to set up “boundaries.” That’s what they tell you to do, to have boundaries, but it wasn’t doable. What I do now is a structured process that works. There is a grid.

There are certain exercises we do at various points to get the ideas out of your head and into an experimental structure. There’s a score sheet called the win score sheet that is extremely well tested and works well for determining whether an experiment is getting you to where you need to be. The thing runs like a machine because it’s more like a product than a service.

This resonates with many people. It’s going from customized engagements and projects where you’re still applying your expertise but you’re not necessarily following a framework to then establishing a clear framework and process. Even though the recommendations, the advice, and the ideas that can come up during that engagement with the client as they go through the framework can be customized to their situation, the process and steps you’re taking them through are part of that framework.

It’s easier for you and for your team to follow those things. It also conveys and communicates a lot more expertise to the client because they feel more confident knowing that you have this process they need to follow. It’s not just as custom. Therefore, you’re taking them through that. We’ve seen that with so many clients over the years. That’s a great example of going from a lot more chaos to more structure and the benefits of doing that and creating productized offerings.

You have to actually have a tested process that works. Click To Tweet

It’s ironic because my mindset, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners’ mindsets, is that if my client says “Jump,” I say, “How high?” because that’s how I’ve been giving good service. I’m going to outwork everybody else and show that I’m the best service provider out there. That doesn’t work because what happens is this whole idea of under-promise over-deliver. I’m not sure I buy it, because the over-delivering becomes the new standard.

If you set up a dynamic where your client asks you once to write a three-page sales email and you do it just to do it, you’ll be writing three-page sales emails forever. You won’t get your main job done that they paid you for. The client will be less happy with you. This isn’t about setting boundaries because you can set boundaries all day and your client will say, “I’m not getting what I paid for. I want that three-page email. Why aren’t you doing it for me?” That’s where it becomes complicated.

The trick is to say, “I have a process that works and it’s laid out.” You must have this process. You can’t lie about this. You have to have a tested process that works. If you follow this process, it works. If you deviate from this process, you’re only harming yourself. It doesn’t work. I would say polish and packaging are a part of that. If you just tell someone, “I have a process. Here’s what it is,” they will think you’re trying to say no to what they’re doing.

If you say, “Here’s a nicely laid-out grid that I’ve created. This shows you the process. We fill out the blanks and it’s called this thing. According to the schedule, which I’m going to show you in full color, we put markers on the cap thing.” You would think that that’s just polished and that’s just packaging. What that says to someone is that this is a real thing that has boundaries to it versus you’re making stuff up as you go along.

We see so often that why clients are engaging a consultant or an advisor is not for the thing you’re going to do. It’s for result or outcome. Taking your example, if clients ask you to write a three-page email, a great response from a consultant would be, “Tell me why. What do you want that email to do for you?” By asking some deep questions, you might be able to show them that, “The email is fine, but there’s a much better way to get you the result you want. We’re going to do this part of this process first for these reasons.”

It’s about the positioning of peers to the client and not just being like, “Do you want me to jump? How high do you want me to jump?” The client is up here. You’re down there. You want to bring yourself to the same level. That’s why they’re bringing you in, it’s because you have expertise that they don’t have. Michael, I want to thank you for coming on. Before we wrap up, I have a couple of quick questions for you. The first is in the last six months or so, what’s the best book that you have read or listened to? It could be nonfiction or fiction. Is there anything that you would recommend?

It’s funny. I’m such a big reader because I came into this as being an artsy-fartsy guy. I read a lot of nonfiction and fiction. I started a book and quickly read half of it, which is fascinating. This series is called Terra Ignota. The first book is called Too Like the Lightning. It’s by Ada Palmer. I read an article about it in WIRED Magazine and Craig Newmark from Craigslist likes it. It’s this science fiction series that’s based on wrestling with some of the big questions about how society learns from their history and how they distort things.

There are no real utopias and no real dystopias but it’s a mixture of both. It’s the kind of book that I don’t know how if or whether it will help my professional life, but it’s not just escapist. It has you thinking about big ideas. I tend to like books with big ideas. Sometimes they work their way into my work. There are so many stories in The Hype Handbook that I read out of interest that weaseled their way into the book. That’s a good one.

That’s a great recommendation. I have not heard of it but I will check it out. Often books that have nothing to do directly with the work that we’re doing can give us not only inspiration, but the ideas somehow do work themselves into the work that we’re doing or provide us with new perspectives or insights that you’re not going to get from reading the same marketing books, business books, management books or whatever that everybody else is reading. Lastly, where can people learn more about you, Michael? Where’s the one website we should send them to?

One of the things that I did take from regular old marketing is that you should have only one ask. I do have a personal website. I do have a company website. My one call to action is to go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and buy The Hype Handbook. If you type in The Hype Handbook and read that thing, it will show you where to find me. If there’s ever any chance you’re going to work with me, it’s by reading my ideas in that book that you’re going to be persuaded to work with me. If not, you’re going to learn a lot and hopefully have fun.

Michael, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

 

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About Michael F. Schein

CSP 243 | HypeYour success depends on getting people to think of you first. But with so much competition in the marketplace, it has become increasingly difficult to attract anyone’s attention.

In a perfect world, ideas would rise and fall on their own merits. But it’s not a perfect world. If you want your message to reach a big audience, you need a presence and a platform that shines.

It’s hard to do, but some people (and companies) always seem to be able to make it happen. They’re the ones who are always in demand as speakers, sources for articles, and interview subjects. They’re the ones who can always find new business opportunities without effort.

At MicroFame Media, we’ve reverse engineered what the most successful thought leaders have in common. Armed with this knowledge, we take our clients through a step-by-step process that turns each one of them into the go-to expert in their industry.

My team and I have applied this practical process for clients such as The Medici Group, University of Pennsylvania, Gordon College, United Methodist Publishing Group, author Derek Lidow, Presentr, Magento, and many others.

If you’re a consultant who needs to scale your business and increase your market share, you need people to see you as the recognized authority in your niche. For those who want to stop trying to make this happen through trial and error, MicroFame Media can help.

 

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