The following is a transcript of Episode 19 of Return on Podcast, the show where we help e-commerce sellers improve their ROI in business and in life. For more episodes, subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
All right. Welcome to Return on Podcast, where we talk about the experiences, the obsessions, and the habits of the most successful e-commerce entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Tyler Jefcoat. I wanna welcome you to this episode of ROP.
One of the common questions that I get in my CFO practice here at Seller Accountant is Tyler, listen, how can I improve or increase the value of my brand, of my company? I wanna command a premium either when I sell my company down the line, or even in the eyes of my customers. Now I wanna be able to charge more. I want my customers to see more value in what I’m offering them. Tyler, how do I do that?
And today I wanna talk about one of the core things that you can do to improve that, which is actually literally the brand itself. I’m gonna bring in my friend, Kate here. Kate, welcome to the show.
Kate DiLeo:
Hello. Thanks so much for having me, Tyler. I appreciate it.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Listen, I’m gonna let you give a little bit more context, but let me give it the old college try of introducing.
Kate DiLeo:
Okay. All right. Alright.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Kate is great. By the way, Kate is a friend of a friend. We’ve connected on so many levels, really have enjoyed your friendship. You’re an author, but you’re a brand architect. So somebody is trying to figure out, how do I build the essence of my offering in a way that’s gonna get more of the right attention from the right customers? Kate might be your girl to help you do that.
You’ve also written a book here recently called, what was it? Oh yeah, that’s right. Muting the Megaphone. It’s funny. I can’t wait to read this, by the way. I bought it. I’ve bought this book, Kate. It has not arrived yet. So Muting the Megaphone or muting – yeah. Stop telling stories and start having conversations. Did I say that right?
Kate DiLeo:
That’s right.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Oh, wow. I was so worried there for a minute I might have gotten it wrong, but Kate, listen. You describe yourself as being an accidental brand strategist. I would even augment that to say an accidental leading brand strategist. Would you tell us how that happened?
Kate DiLeo:
Sure. Okay. So if you’re listening in today, by the way, and you’re like, I have no idea how I got where I am today, congratulations, I’m right there with you. I think you do. I, by the way, I’m 36, almost 37. I’m exhausted. I have four young children. I always say that. I’m like, when I’m not in my day job, I’m doing branding, I go home to four children who are like, Mom. It’s constant. So I’m right there with you, my friends, with all of the kids and the craziness at home, but like many of you that might be listening, I definitely stumbled my way into what I’m currently doing.
So when I graduated, this was back in 2007, 2008 when the market crashed. And so here I was, Tyler, at the time, what was weird is me being a total nerd, I had planned to do a PhD in linguistic anthropology. Oh, which by that way, Ooh super bougie. Right? I totally thought, oh, I’m getting to study and I want to be a professor and teach people how language shapes culture and how culture shapes language.
Market crashes, and I have a professor who was about to start all of my graduate studies. He looks at me, he says, Kate. We love you. But we do not know where this field is going to be, let alone if there’s going to be some crazy, amazing position for you at a university in the United States in the next 10 years. You should probably leave academia, go get a job, pay off your school debt, and then revisit this at a later date.
So of course my Italian father, he’s yeah, please leave my house. Please go get a job and leave my house. Right? So I actually started off in sales, Tyler. Okay. My whole career and my love for brand not only hinged upon that background with linguistic anthropology, but honestly I recognize the power of brand because I took a job cold calling IT professionals to sell them training classes.
Oh, dumbest job you can take. Right? IT people will love to be called and they love to be sold to. And here I was in this job in my twenties and I had to figure out how to smile and dial and meet my numbers and get these folks to want to have a conversation with me. And nothing was working, and I was going to be out of a job. And so Tyler, all that complex sales scripting, all of the email marketing campaigns, it was just, it was junk.
So I decided that I was going to be a total problem child and I was gonna throw out their stuff and I was gonna do it my way, ’cause I actually had nothing to lose at that point. So I basically thought, you know, what, if I’m the customer right now, if I’m the person on the phone here, what would I want to know to actually wanna talk with somebody like me? And I decided to just boil it down and get to the point. I thought, you know, what, if I can tell ’em in 15, 20 seconds, this is what I do, this is how I solve your problem, and this is how I’m different – by the way, that’s what you call a brand pitch.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yep.
Kate DiLeo:
Maybe they’re gonna wanna stay on the phone with me, email me back. It worked. I ended up running a successful 1.2 million a year, quota and making that and having millions and millions in pipeline that I manage. And I ended up getting recruited out. So I actually had a marketing agency hire me out. They’re like, we love what you’re doing over here. Can you come write this brand pitch stuff for some of our clients while we’re doing other work?
So that was the beginning for me, Tyler. I started working in agency world and then corporate America. And for about, I would say eight or nine years of that time, I actually, my business was a side hustle. I was just building brands on the side for people. And then in 2019, I did go full time with this. But up until now, and I’ve worked with almost 300 companies globally. Most of them are technology based or have a technology or e-com component. And I’ve really been hell bent on how do we help them build a brand message that’s gonna enable them to win more work.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Okay, and that actually might be the best next question here is how do you build a brand message that helps them win more work?
Kate DiLeo:
Sure let’s get into it. Right? Like I’m a total pragmatist. Like when we talk about brand, I think also it’s important to acknowledge like in this world of marketing, that sounds so fluffy and nebulous and like, who cares? Right? But actually at its core, when you ask the question what is a brand, your brand is your promise of what you say your customer supposed to experience or receive from you, what value they get when they interact with you, your products, or your services.
And so at the core there’s three big components in messaging or sales language that somebody needs to have at the front to capture that audience and get them to go, okay, I wanna click and shop. I want to take that next step. I want to fill out the form, watch the video, whatever it is. Okay. In order to catch your person to convert, you have to create a brand conversation that gets them there in 20 seconds.
There’s three things. Number one is a tagline that answers the question “what do you?” Number two is a value proposition statement, which is a big bougie, fluffy marketing statement that basically says, here’s the pain or problem you have. Here’s how we solve that problem. And then the third thing is what we call differentiator statements, sometimes called like your 1, 2, 3 uniques, for example, but it’s really the 1, 2, 3, maybe four big bullets of how your company is different and better than the rest.
So tell me what you do. Tell me how you solve my problem. Tell me how you’re different. That’s the stuff, Tyler, based on buyer psychology that’s going to get that buyer to go, yep, you get me. I love this. I’m ready to go look at stuff for them.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I mean, what’s so powerful about this, Kate, is that I do think we can, we can be either paralyzed by being overwhelmed by saying, yeah, I really wanna build a great brand, but I don’t know practically how to do it. Or maybe we can either become so in love with our story, right, that it becomes more about us. I think I actually saw this in some of your content and I was like, oh no. You don’t wanna have a brand that tells your story.
You wanna have a brand that tells someone else’s story. And that makes sense. So help me bring this in. So somebody’s a kind of an average e-commerce related brand owner. And they’re what are they feeling right now where they may need to make a change in the way they’re approaching their brand? Like what mistakes they’re making.
Kate DiLeo:
That’s a great question. Okay. So often there’s some symptoms, right? So there’s some symptoms of, then you go as a business owner or a marketing or sales leader, where you’re like, let me take a look at our brand message. All right. The symptoms being in B2B services, for example, oh my God, our sales cycle is so long. It takes us like three to six months to close a deal. Kate, we’re really struggling to get prospects to the table. Gosh, Kate, I’m even struggling to get conversions right now on my website. Hey, I’m seeing a huge drop off on core pages. Like I had the lead – the ad worked and they get to the homepage and then they drop. Or, hey, why am I having shopping cart abandonment issues?
Or they say things like we have a new products and segment to the market we’re trying to go after we have no idea how to talk about that one versus how we’ve done a really good job over here. Okay. Those are all situations where, ding ding, you need to go back to your messaging and you need to kind of take a look at your brand from a couple points and say, okay, hold on.
Who are we trying to talk to? And why? Who is that ideal customer? Right? For various products or services. And then what is a message that we’re saying? And do we have a message that actually speaks to the heart pain we solve for them?
Tyler Jefcoat:
That’s really well said. It’s one of those things, by the way, Kate, that sounds really simple, but also maybe not very easy. As a, as like a left brain finance guy, I’m like, oh yeah. I was like, yeah, I wanna, I wanna resonate with what their felt heart pain is. I’m like, wait a second. I can’t even do that in my marriage very well. Yeah. You know what I mean? So, okay. So what is one area that brand builders should be spending more of their energy on right now that you’re, I don’t know. Just broad question. But where should we be spending more of our energy that might give us return?
Kate DiLeo:
Okay. I think it’s a big question. I’ll try and answer this maybe in a few ways, if I could. ‘Cause there’s a couple –
Tyler Jefcoat:
Sure. You take it.
Kate DiLeo:
– ways you could approach this. All right. So I think at a first point you hit on this a minute ago. I think that in general as companies and as leaders, we need to move away from storytelling.
I’m an anti-storyteller. Like my whole book is called “stop telling stories and start having conversations with your brand.” Right? And if you’ve heard of this guy, Donald Miller, who came out with this concept of StoryBrand. Okay. Listen, Donald Miller was brilliant. He did a great job, right?
His whole concept of putting the customer at the heart of your entire story, making them the hero, making it all about them – brilliant. The problem is we took that, this idea of storytelling and we ran with it. We made it all about us. So we have all these companies out there thinking they’re doing storytelling, and it’s storytelling of the wrong flavor.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Oh, no.
Kate DiLeo:
Here’s the thing. Storytelling is not very compelling when you get to the heart of it. You know, why? You have one person talking and one person listening. How is it supposed to compel our buyer? The method that I teach, that I want you to think about is how do you create a conversation with your brand that actually converts. Well, the secret to that is going back to what I said earlier with a few key components that are layered in the right order.
It’s a very, it’s a formulaic process, by the way. If you like formulas, I love formulas. It’s one plus two plus three equals point of conversion. And when you layer these sentences correctly and you allow them to be provocative, what you’ve done is after they read or they hear each sentence or statement, you’re actually allowing your prospect, whether they’re on your website or they’re in the zoom room with you to ask the next question.
Really? What do they mean by that? Oh, hold on. That’s interesting. Wait a second. When you start getting that type of mental response from somebody as they’re reading, or as they’re talking with you, you’ve created a brand conversation. And that’s what I want us to think about. Are you just shouting like a megaphone with all of your features and benefits and colors and pricing and options and sales and the…
You ever been on the other side of that? What happens? You’re like, eh.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah. Back off.
Kate DiLeo:
Inundation of noise, right?
Tyler Jefcoat:
It’s so true. It’s so true. And so ’cause I actually get that. ‘Cause I actually love Donald Miller’s work like you do. And I can see how, one of the many ways that we take great thought leadership and kind of bastardize it is that we internalize a really cool idea and make it about us instead of about actually having a dialogue.
Okay. So if I’m a brand. Now again, a lot of the brains are gonna listen to this podcast are selling some kind of a physical product. I’m selling the blue one, I’m selling it on my Shopify site and on, maybe on Amazon or something like that. And if I wanted to take a couple of concrete steps toward having more of a dialogue or conversational relationship with my key core customer. Can you help me bridge that gap a little bit? What does that look like?
Kate DiLeo:
Sure. All right. Can I be super blunt with you? I used to build websites in a former life, and I love talking about website theory too. Now, by the way, have you noticed how we went into the days of sales funnel pages galore that are like 16 miles long. And now we’re finally going back to the core of more simple to the point website pages. Hallelujah. I love it. Okay. So here’s the thing. If you have five calls to action on your homepage, something’s wrong. That’s a lot of calls to action. Ultimately, if you’re trying to sell products on your website, or even in B2B services, and you have like, I want them to fill the form to set up a demo or get on a call with me.
Right? If that’s what you want, simple step: shop and buy or contact me. Here’s the thing, on the homepage of your website, that is your prominent sales real estate. This is where your brand goes. And when we think about a website page, you have this real estate what we call above the fold of the page, right, before you have to start to scroll.
Okay. Now I’ve seen the coolest ones with flashy imagery and live videos and all these things, and that’s great. But what has to be there is right below your logo is a big, bold tagline. And then I also need to see your value proposition statement. You guys, if you are burying that information on other pages or it’s way far down before they start to shop, you’re losing people.
People are not ready to buy yet until that you tell them what you do, how you solve their problem, and how you’re different. That’s okay. The job of your brand is to get there as quickly as possible. So when we actually go to website page, Tyler, I always am recommending, get that value prop and tagline right there, front and center, as fast as you can. And then when people start to scroll in that first set of white space, it’s your differentiators. Then move into the shopping cart. Okay. Then move into your categories and all the other things. But not until you can answer those questions.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I feel like that’s actually really instructive. ‘Cause I think those questions, the 1, 2, 3 of the tagline is kinda what do you do? And then the value proposition – what, define that one again, the value proposition, as you’re saying it is what?
Kate DiLeo:
It’s saying this is the pain I know you’re experiencing, and this is how we solve that pain. Can I give you a great example of a branch who does this?
Tyler Jefcoat:
Okay. Yes. Yes.
Kate DiLeo:
Okay. So if you’ve ever checked out, there’s this group called The Beard Club. Have you heard of them?
Tyler Jefcoat:
I feel like I’ve heard of them.
Kate DiLeo:
I don’t have a beard.
Tyler Jefcoat:
No, you don’t.
Kate DiLeo:
However, my friends have beards and I’ve looked at this company, The Beard Club, thebeardclub.com. You go right to their website. “Discover your best beard.” Ah, that’s our tagline. They help you discover your best beard. Boom. It’s right there. And then right below it, they’ve got a call to action, a really nice value prop, it’s super simple. And it says, say goodbye to your beard issues and unlock a free item. Boom. They’re telling you exactly the value of what you get your pain, right?
They got it. It is right there at the top of the page. It didn’t overwhelm all their beautiful photography. And I was like, I’m compelled to scroll. And away they go right on down.
Tyler Jefcoat:
That’s so good. I’m even thinking about this could probably apply even to a, kind of a finite listing situation. Like a, for instance, like an Amazon listing where you, your headline photo in the, that first infographic or those first couple of bullet points, or the kinds of words that you choose to bake into your title are so crucial because they need to – and that, maybe that was one actually thing that took away from Donald Miller’s book that I think is still instructive here is to actually take the time to unpack who your customer is and even to answer that question what is that emotional heartfelt pain point that, yeah.
Kate DiLeo:
Yeah. You’re so spot on, Tyler. In fact, when I work with clients, we spend an entire one or two sessions on that. They’re like really Kate we’re going into these. Yes, we are my friends so that we can come back up and out of them, write your brand.
But honestly, I think we take for granted a couple big things. We think about selling our products. Okay. Number one, we believe technically speaking, everybody could use us and want us and love us and buy from us. Right. My product serves everybody. Yes. But is everybody gonna buy it? No. So hold on. The trajectory of growing your company and candidly talking about revenue generation here, let’s be real.
Your bottom line and your top line are directly hinged upon your ability to niche in and do a fantastic job serving one or two, maybe three groups of people very well. And if you do a really good job with a brand that speaks to those small audiences or specific audiences, as your revenue share grows, you can expand market share and who you’re going after with secondary, third messages, and I’ll tell you who did the best job at this. Facebook. Okay.
Back in the glory days when I was in college, 2004 freshman year, I’m like dating myself right now. Okay. Freshman year of college, 2004 at the University of Minnesota, we were one of the first universities, they picked like their top 1,500 universities, I I think it was around that number, around the country to be like the inaugural class to sign up for Facebook. Prior to that, by the way, it was only like, I think at Harvard and in east coast schools, they tested it. They betaed it, and then they rolled it. Okay. So when we got on Facebook, you had to have a .edu email to even get onto Facebook.
I don’t think a lot of people remember this. Then much to my dismay. A couple years later, my mother shows up on Facebook. They had expanded the pie ’cause they did so well in schools. Then they expanded the pie again by knocking the age barrier down. See Facebook knew that if they could do so well with building a reputation and getting as many people over here to buy, others are gonna start to want them.
And when that demand starts to build with your brand, then you build that message in marketing to those groups.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I love it. And if you think about this, like the genius of this is first of all, what you said is objectively true. I cannot be all things to all people, right? I’m going to have to get focused.
And, but the sweet benefit of choosing to get focused is that if I can address my customer, whatever her needs are, perfectly, if I can address all of her anxiety points, I actually get the privilege of charging a premium for my product. Because, and here’s a real concrete example. I was leading my mastermind at a live retreat this weekend, and we were doing a game called shred the listing.
So we would put someone’s product up on the screen. We’re all kind of experts. We’re like, oh, we like this bullet point. This is a little confusing and we would unbox the product if they brought it, that kind of thing. And we looked at one product and one of the guys was like, listen, if you just made it a little bit clearer that you’re selling this wheel for this exact model of lawnmower, I would pay twice as much for it because it’s such a pain in the ass to go buy it twice when you get the wrong model.
And so that’s just one micro example of – don’t forget that by the way, there are real people buying your product from your website or from the marketplace. And another example, by the way, this is just thinking about, you’re talking about school. My favorite professor in the MBA program at Georgia used to own a big, like a painting company. And he decided for whatever reason that he was gonna get so nichey, he believed he’s the one that taught me the phrase, “there are riches and niches,” right. Let’s get really nichey. And he said, we’re gonna go after early forties women in Atlanta that are recently divorced.
Kate DiLeo:
Oh my God. He must have made millions with that audience.
Tyler Jefcoat:
And so he engineered his entire offering around she’s feeling a new sense of freedom in her life. And she wants to spring clean. She doesn’t want dudes going to the bathroom at her house. She wants a very, it’s a very specific experience. And what he found is if I engineer around her, I get everyone else also, right?
Because I’ve created an avatar that is so clean. And I just think maybe that’s a worthy thought experiment for anyone who’s listening to this episode is for my offering, for my product, what is the absolute best customer, meaning the person who should convert 100% of the time, because it solves the entire problem for them, and they feel like they’re glowing and they can’t wait to spend more money with your product. Probably going deeper and making it clear for more of her, or for him is actually gonna get you farther, faster than trying to be everything to everybody.
Kate DiLeo:
I agree. And it’s funny cause I teach an entire workshop on this. I call it How to Refine Your Rolodex. Right. Does anybody know to Rolodex is? Remember back in the glory days where you had to keep your contacts, your business cards? All right. If I’m speaking to a Gen Z they’re like, we have no idea what you’re talking about.
So there’s some certain questions too that I ask people to think about when they’re refining your target audiences: who is the most fun and easy to work with? Who’s most aligned with your culture? What buyers are most aligned with your culture? Who’s gonna become your biggest raving fans? Who sees the highest value in what you offer? Who knows they can’t get it done on their own? Who’s willing to pay to have their pain solved? By the way, who’s the fastest decision maker? Who makes the best and fastest decisions?
Who’s really a repeat or happy customer, always keeps coming back? Who’s the type of customer that would refer all their friends to come and buy from you? You know, when you think about that, you begin to even narrow within a selection. This is really even in B2B or B2C, if you’re selling an e-comm, this is about prospecting smarter, not harder.
And when we actually think about where your marketing dollars go, if your people are not on Facebook, stop running Facebook ads. If your people are on Instagram, but only in these three groups, get there. If influencer is where you’re supposed to get, and that’s where you’re getting traction go there. But it’s really getting surgical and you cannot get surgical with your marketing spend and even your sales team’s efforts if you don’t know who you’re going after and why.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Well, and this is so crucial right now, Kate, I was actually talking to a friend last week about how competitive even PPC, like bids are up lot in several categories.
Kate DiLeo:
It’s crazy right now. Yes.
Tyler Jefcoat:
And so if you’re just trying to continue bloodying the waters paying at twice the cost per click for the same keyword or for the same, you’re going to find that’s a losing battle. And so one way to get more nuanced, I think, is what you’re saying there, Kate, which is if I can just understand a little bit better, the best, the 80/20. What are the 20% of my prospects that really generate most of the value, and I just think this is really wise.
And by the way so all those questions that Kate just asked you should ask yourself and you should go back, rewind this, listen to it again, and type those out and think about them. But if you’re looking for a way to more algorithmically answer those questions, and you’re an e-comm product seller, I just wanna recommend having your VA or doing this yourself, scrape all of the reviews that you’ve ever had on your products.
Put ’em into a Google doc. Actually I would say put him into two Google docs, one for smiley face reviews and one for frowny face reviews. And then use one of these online free word cloud kind of tools to tease out what the themes are. And then I would do the exact same exercise for your top three competitors.
What are the things that my, because you’re gonna get a sense – because by the way, somebody who would go and willingly leave a five star review is somebody who is probably pretty happy with the purchase. And so you’re gonna be kind of surprised to be like, oh my gosh, I realized that I’m not selling to a, whatever, a 42 year old woman recently divorced, I’m selling to a college guy.
I don’t know. This would be really helpful information because then you can orient your keywords and your spend and your content, and even the kind of influencers you hire specifically around that target customer.
Kate DiLeo:
And I think what that enables you to do is when you understand who you want to purchase from you, you have choice. Here’s what I wanna always remember. You are not in the business of convincing, you’re in the business of converting. It is not your job to convince everybody in the world to buy from you. It is your job as a business, as an organization, to grow revenue quite strategically for you and your investors by systematically speaking to and solving the problem of one or two or maybe three groups of people who have the highest pain that directly resonates with the message that you served up. That is a win-win.
And here’s the thing, when you target that in, you will find not only top of funnel impact, but bottom of funnel impact. This is where we start to see startups who do really well go from just focusing on get more sales, get more sales to we’ve built an entire customer success department, and now we’re looking at churn. We’re looking at interesting questions around experience and how do we make a better buying experience and then looking at the technology and shopping cart platform to make that even more robust and beautiful.
See when you actually hone in on that and you keep that front and center, all of a sudden, it’s not just about sales, is it? It’s about the entire journey. And that’s what gets really exciting because you begin to build lifelong value added customers that impact your bottom line. How much is it costing you to not know exactly who you’re going after? What revenues are you actually losing because you don’t understand what your customer needs after the first sale?
Tyler Jefcoat:
That’s right. It’s funny you mentioned this because I was talking to somebody about this last week where some of our like products we buy online, we wouldn’t view them as being repeat customers, but I actually think that’s false. I think, I think if you get in front of your ideal customer, and the example I used is I’m a product evangelist with my friends. If you sell me something that I love. I’m gonna turn around and buy four of them, or these are gonna become the Christmas presents. If my kid loves the game, I’m gonna buy it for my nieces and nephews.
And so I think again being strategic is if I can spend my precious ad dollars to attract Tyler who, when he resonates with my product is gonna buy five of them because he loves his nieces and nephews versus some other guy down the street who’s only gonna buy one, and he is yeah, whatever, it’s fine. Again, it’s just another way of you and I are articulating a very practical outflow of the 80/20 principle. We have to get focused so that we get as much impact as we can get from each dollar we invest in the company. Anything else about like branding or brand building before we pivot to something fun here, Kate? Anything that’d be like a final thought for if you’re gonna do, if you’re gonna do nothing, if you hear nothing else that I say, think about your brand with this.
Kate DiLeo:
Here’s the two things. Number one. Know who the heck you’re going after and why and nail that sucker down. Number two. I want to make sure that you are really focusing on, do I have a brand message? The 1, 2, 3 of a tagline that saves what, says what I do, a value proposition statement that says how I solve your problem, and then differentiate your statement says, say 1, 2, 3, how I’m different and better than the rest. If you have those things in place and you have them as far up that homepage as possible, I can guarantee you, you’re gonna see direct impact on sales and revenue.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Beautiful. And so again, you, impact on sales and revenue ends up resulting in impact, not just in higher conversions, but higher juice with the algorithm if you’re trying to get SEO. This is great advice. All right, listen, we can’t just talk about business, Kate. I wanna talk about something fun, and I always ask. So you put, you booked this podcast and I was like, what do you do for hobbies? And you said scuba diving, and I laugh because you live in Minnesota. So tell me the story here.
Kate DiLeo:
We’re land locked in. Okay. Can I just tell you, A based on my hobbies and B based on my personalities, I stick out like a sore thumb here, right? I’m in the land of passive aggressive in the Midwest. God bless ’em. Minnesota nice. And I am a type A Italian that should belong in New York. East or west coast, right? I’m in the wrong place. And it’s hilarious. Every day I just realize that. Scuba diving, my husband got me into scuba diving. He said, hey, you’re going to Hawaii with a girlfriend. Why don’t you try one of those intro scuba classes? So I tried it. I was definitely afraid I get down there and I was going, this is the most calming experience I have ever had.
And for somebody with my energy, it’s the anti adrenaline rush. Like I get outta scuba diving and I’m like zen. I am zen for days. So we have scuba dived quite a few places around the world. And actually a few weeks ago, we went down to Roatán, Honduras, and we did 15 dives in a week. We went shark diving, swam with the sea turtles and dove with them, did a night dive in the pitch black and saw octopus and all sorts of things. It was so cool. So for me, that is my big passion.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I love it. And by the way I’ve been scuba diving exactly once. And I learned on that trip that scuba diving is fun, but I also learned that I am very motion sickness on boats.
Kate DiLeo:
Not for the faint of stomach.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I felt like such a, I felt like as a kid, I could always do like the roller coasters and stuff. As an adult, I don’t know. I don’t feel great about it, Kate.
Kate DiLeo:
But that’s like people that are like Kate, just go skiing. You’ll love it. I’m like, no. Me going down a mountain from a large height is just me telling myself, “don’t die, don’t die, don’t die,” the entire time. It is not, I don’t care what equipment I bought. I spent thousands on equipment. I still had the same sentiment the entire time going down the hill.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Love it. Kate it’s pitch time. So you have a great website that is conveniently your name, Kate DiLeo, D I L E O.com, KateDiLeo.com. What, who is, what is the person feeling? Actually, lemme just ask you this way. Give us your 1, 2, 3, and then help us remember which one’s which real quick so that we know who needs to contact you.
Kate DiLeo:
Sure. My tagline is “building brands that win more work.” My value prop is “business is a conversation and not a transaction, but many companies struggle to create conversations that convert. Create a message that gets more of the right prospects at the right table at the right time.” and then differentiators, I go through them. Singular focus, actionable tactics, educational pros, transparent pricing. Boom, boom, boom.
Here’s the thing. If you are sitting here today and you’re struggling to articulate and take the 35 ways of how you think and talk about your business and your products, you’re like, “I don’t know how to boil that down. I don’t know how to build that 1, 2, 3. We know that we want to do more. We know we’ve got the raw stuff here, Kate, but we aren’t sure how to wordsmith that.” I really would recommend, first off, you could actually go to my website and check out my book. It is available at Amazon.com, and that’s a great 15 bucks or 20 bucks to be able to just actually learn practically how you do this.
Okay. It’s tactical, practical brand guide. It’s a hundred pages. Get the highlighter out. I walk you through the formula, and I teach you how to actually write the sentences. But at that point, if you’re just like, “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t have time to do this,” get ahold of me, feel free to contact me if you wanna have a conversation.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Beautiful. So if that if that pitch resonated guys, I think and so many brands, it will, by the way, Kate, I think, first of all, a no brainer. I love this. If you can ever show me a solution to my problem that costs me $15. yeah, I’m always happy about that. So I’ve actually, I have already bought the book, Muting the Megaphone: Stop Telling Stories and Start Having Conversations.
Soon as it goes live here in the next literally couple weeks. I can’t wait to get my copy. And then I think for any of you guys that hear this and they’re like, wow, I really need help smithing or dialing in my message so that I’m not shouting at my prospective customer, but I actually know what she looks like, and I’m having a conversation with her, Kate may be a good partner for you to explore.
So Kate, before we close the show here, we end every episode with this. We call it the Return on Podcast. We wanna, if somebody’s made it 30 minutes into this show, we wanna guarantee them a return on the podcast, and one of the easy ways to do that is to give them a habit, a hack, a practice, personal, professional that has given you and me, as the kind of people on the show, the most success, the most return on our investments.
I just, I mean, it’s a broad question, but is there anything that you do weekly or daily or that you’re like, man if you take nothing else away, try this. Read this, measure this, track this, and you’ll get a big ROI. What, what pops into your head when I say that?
Kate DiLeo:
Of course, I’m gonna tell you, go get your message nailed down. Right? But I think the thing is Tyler, there is this principle of being confident enough of your expertise, of your genius, being confident enough every day to wake up and remember: I am not in the business of convincing, I am in the business of converting. And if you can stand on that, you are going to find that you have a direct impact on your joy, on your top line revenue, on your bottom line and everything in the between of how you run and operate your business.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Beautiful. Beautiful. That’s awesome. Conviction. I was talking to some private equity guys last year, and I was like, what is the most attractive thing about an owner you might acquire the business? They said conviction of growth. And so knowing that you have what it takes, believing that your service or your product really is the best, and then starting from that place is such a great idea. So that’s awesome, Kate. Okay. Kate, you’re amazing. Thank you for joining.
Kate DiLeo:
Thank you. You are too, Tyler. I really appreciate you having me on today.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Absolutely. So KateDiLeo.com. You’re gonna want to go to Amazon and buy Muting the Megaphone: Stop Telling Stories and Start Having Conversations so that you can be walked step by step through how to really engineer those three key points from Kate.
Some of you’re gonna read and be like, oh boy, I actually needed an expert to help me do this. You’re gonna call Kate. She’s gonna help you. So Kate, again, you’re awesome. Really grateful for our friendship. Hope that you and your side hustle of being a consultant after like wrangling four kids and a husband, I hope you continue to do well there.
Kate DiLeo:
Thank you so much, Tyler. Appreciate it.
Tyler Jefcoat:
All right. Well with that guys, we’re gonna end this episode of Return on Podcast. Thank you for joining us. We really, your time is so valuable and we view this as a gift. We hope that you grab something from this episode that’ll make you more money, more successful, more joyful in your life. Until next time, take care.