TCC Podcast #42: Creating Proposals that Work with Casey Slaughter Stanton

In the 42nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with Casey Slaughter Stanton about his career path and how he found his way into marketing by pushing a lawn mower. Today he runs his own marketing and tech business, and focuses on what he calls “functional marketing”. During our conversation, we asked Casey about his approach to business and working with customers. He shared: •  How you can sell more by selling to only one person •  How empathetic guessing can help you connect better with your customers •  The DOS formula and how it helps him understand his client’s business •  His approach to creating proposal clients can’t say “no” to •  How to qualify potential clients so you only work with the right ones •  What he learned working with Gary Bencivenga and Ted Nicolas (he didn’t know who they were at the time), and •  The “head, heart, and home” questions he asks about each of his clients This one is less about copywriting and more about selling your client on your services and expertise. If you struggle to land more than half of the clients who you talk to about a project, this is a must-listen episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Tony Robbins Tech Guys Who Get Marketing Dr. Marshall Rosenburg Genius Network Joe Polish KOLBE Dan Sullivan StrengthsFinder Gary Bencivenga Ted Nicholas Peter Diamandis Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World 10X Talks Strategic Coach Titans of Direct Response Brian Kurtz Parris Lampropolous CaseyStanton.com The Proposal Template Casey shared at Titans Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Kira: What if you can hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts? Ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 42 as we chat with Casey Slaughter Stanton about how single proprietors like copywriters can better market themselves, improving the sales process, creating client proposals that clients say yes to, and what he calls city dating. Kira: Hey, Casey. Hey, Rob. How is it going? Rob: Guys. Casey: Hey, great. Great, great to be on, you all. Kira: Casey, a really great place to start would be with your story and since most of our audience has not heard of you before so let’s start there. Casey: Sure. Back in 2008 I graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Policy. When I say graduated, I just did the air quotes because I had to plead to my native American music professor to actually give me a D minus in the class and I think he gave me a D. He even threw me a bone there so I graduated somehow. I was pretty shocked and I hit the workforce and I was looking for jobs immediately after school thinking that I could get into a sales role. What I found was that unemployment was a real big issue and I watch the unemployment stats go from 5% to 6 to 7 to 8 to 9. While I was still looking for a job, they topped out at 10.5% and I was screwed because I had no real experience in anything and environment policy. It kind of meant I could only work in lancing and I just couldn’t survive there. What I was forced to do was move back home with my parents and I took the basement over and picked up a job mowing lawns and spent a whole summer on the back of a lawn mower trying to figure out what I was going to do. Lucky for me I was able to grab a couple Tony Robbins tapes from the library. I found a bunch of resources online and just started listening and learning and just overloading my brain with different ideas and seeing what was out there. I was mowing lawns at a guy’s place, his name was Dave and he had this beautiful house and he just really was like living the good life. Every time I saw him he was like having a Mai Tai or like a tea out on his deck overlooking the bay. I asked him one day. I said, “Hey, Dave, how did you do it? How did you get to be so successful that you could afford a place like this?” He said, “Well, Casey, I invented a product and got it patented and I have a group of distributors that sell it.” I said, “I want to do it, man. I want to live this life.” He said, “You can buy some of the products and you can go ahead and sell them.” I said, “Could you front me? I’m a little short on cash.” He said, “No, I can’t.” A few weeks later I’d saved enough money up and I bought ten products of his and went door to door and I sold a couple and I made more money that first day of selling door to door in less time than I did in a week of mowing the lawns. I knew that selling was something that I was just naturally good at. Being a millennial and growing up with the internet, I said to myself like, “There’s got to be an easier way than going door to door.” I looked online and I talked to one of my dad’s friends who was in marketing and he said, “Oh, that’s marketing. You’re doing sales and if you want to multiply that, that’s marketing.” That definition of marketing and salesmanship multiply really fit in here. That’s where I got started in marketing and started selling products online, finding local clients, doing copywriting in marketing and technology implementation for them. I ran that for a few years. Met up with a guy named Mike Cline who has a business Tech Guys Who Get Marketing, it’s kind of a collective of technologist and marketers and copywriters and designers. We all work together to support clients. I was working with them, became the chief marketing officer there and later went on to become a marketing professor at Tulane University. Again, with a Bachelor’s of Science in Environmental Policy, I was teaching at a business school, marketing. All of my education has been through spending time in other people’s businesses and learning about what they do and how they do it and just taking that in creatively applying it to different places. Rob: Casey, what you’re doing now then is a lot more than just selling a couple of products, right? Casey: What I’ve done is I’ve created my own strategy in marketing which I call functional marketing and functional sales and functional teams. It’s the trifecta of what I’ve had the most experience in and the things that I found that really move the needle in the business the most. Functional marketing looks at a business at large and says, “What happened in the past? What assets do you have? What marketing campaigns worked and didn’t work? What assets do you have? What mailing lists? What favorites are owed to you? What’s your unique ability to use a strategic coach term?” Really figuring out the history of a business and then from that I say, “Okay, where do we want to be in 90 days or two years?” They give me ideas and then I help them get more solidified goals and then I lay out strategies in different marketing tests that are more holistic in the business to help them achieve the results that they want in 90 days and in two years. I work really with clients for 90 days at a time and we just keep going and going. In two years, we aim to hit that two-year goal. That’s the approach that I take and I need technologist and that’s the Tech Guys Who Get Marketing team. I can pull in the techs there and project managers so they can support me in places that I’m incredibly weak. I don’t want to be a good project manager, I want to be the best marketing strategist and that’s what having a team of other people allows me to do. Kira: Casey, I want to get into functional marketing and your business but before that, I want to go back to when you were selling door to door. I want to know what made you that great sales person. What did you have at that stage? What can you advise us to do because we’re all selling whether or not door to door selling through online copy, what can we do better? Casey: Great question. Ultimately, sales is a one to one human interaction and it’s about understanding who you’re talking to and fitting the product or service to them and not trying to say to a huge crowd of people, “This is the one product for you.” What I like to do is to sell individually and whenever I sell face to face, if I sell on a sales call I just had a big sales call before this call and it was me talking to one person or if I’m going to sell a product online I’m still only selling to one person. It may be that there’s a multitude of those people. There might be hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of those prospects that are online that might see the offer but I’m still just selling to the one individual at a time. I don’t like to use you guys or group people together. I’d like to look at what makes people unique and different. I’m confident that that’s the thing that has made me so successful in sales is identifying who the person is, making empathy guesses and that’s the idea that comes from Dr. Marshall Rosenberg and his work on Nonviolent Communication. He says taking guess like an empathetic guess on how the person’s feeling and why they’re feeling that way and really clue into that and then talk through their experience in the world and how your product or service can solve that problem. I think that that’s just made a huge difference in me being connected to the person and that necessitates that we as marketers, copywriters,