TCC Podcast #447: How to Open More Wallets with Katelyn Bourgoin

When it comes to getting customers to buy more, it helps to have psychology working for you. So I invited buyer psychologist, Katelyn Bourgoin, to chat with me about the marketing tactics that truly make a difference when it comes to getting customer to open their wallets. This is a great discussion that covers insights like Jobs to Be Done, Trigger Events, and the deep psychology that engages customers and keeps them coming back for more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Katelyn’s Newsletter Wallet Opening Words <— Get this! The Milkshake Video Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Transcript: Rob Marsh: Why do people buy the products and services we write about? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. Before you can sell the products and services you write about, you need to understand why your customers buy in the first place. This includes marketing concepts like market/message match, jobs to be done, market sophistication, clarifying an offer, finding pain points, and finding under-served markets.  My guest today is buyer psychologist Katelyn Bourgoin. She writes the Why People Buy newsletter and focuses on using science and psychology to sell more of whatever it is that you are writing about. Personally, these are the topics I could talk about for hours. If you want to sell more of the products and services you write about, you’ll definitely want to listen to this entire episode. What Katelyn shares about “trigger moments” is in my opinion one of the most important concepts in marketing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.  Katelyn and I also talked about making difficult decisions like shutting down a business that isn’t working, or choosing between taking a real job and doing something on your own, and the mindset shifts required to make these decisions. And I grilled Katelyn on the methods she used to grow her newsletter. If you write a newsletter (or want to write a newsletter), her ideas will help you attract new readers faster. Before we get to my interview with Katelyn, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  And now, my interview with Katelyn Bourgoin… So Katelyn, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. I've been wanting to have you on the show, literally, for like, a year. I'm not sure why it took so long to make the right connections, but thanks to Jordan for helping to make it happen. But since you're here, tell us your story. I know you've got a great story of, you know, some business success and failure, but you have created an amazingly successful newsletter. I love it. It's one of those that I wait for it to come into my email box, and probably because the topic is the topic that just rings my bell, which is persuasion. So anyway, tell me your story. How did you get here? Katelyn Bourgoin: That's a long question.  Rob Marsh: It was a terrible question.  Katelyn Bourgoin: No, it's a great question. I just feel like I'm, you know, I'm always kind of thinking about the best way to share this story, because it's long and winding as most entrepreneurs are, and like, to your point, things look great today, but there have been a lot of ups and downs to get to this point. And so maybe I'll share a little bit of the journey before launching the newsletter, which is why we buy so prior to launching the newsletter, if we go all the way back to like 2014 so we're talking like 11 years ago, I was running a branding agency. I'd actually just sold the sister company, which was a restaurant consulting agency, and I was having this kind of crisis of identity, like I think a lot of folks do, or I was like, I need to stop selling time for money. I want to sell something that scales, something more scalable. And at the time 2014 I was under the impression that the online course and online, you know, creative world was too busy, so I should do something else. Now, this is funny, considering that it's still an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to get into that world. And that's, you know, really what the business is that I run today, 11 years later. So I decided I was going to do something else, and I was going to launch a tech company. Because how hard could that be? Really, really effing hard, Rob. Things did not go as planned. We launched an initial product, got some venture capital funding. Inc Magazine was saying we were building the next LinkedIn for women. Everything looked awesome from the outside. It was not going awesome on the inside. We really understood the customer we were going after. And of course, I was good at marketing and PR, but not so good at building the right product. I built the wrong product, and it wasn't solving the core pain point that the audience that we decided to go after needed us to solve for them. It was janky. It didn't work very well. And so we'd have 1000s of people signing up, and they would post, and they kind of create a profile, and they did not stick around. They didn't really maintain their activity. And so in the last dish effort, I ended up pivoting to more of a think tank model.  But at that point, I was so burned out, and we were out of money, and I was just like, I can't keep going. And so ended up closing down the company, super sad, licking my wounds, trying to decide, what am I going to be when I grow up? Had to go bankrupt because I'd taken a bunch of personally guaranteed loans in the early days before we raised venture capital and trying to figure out what's next. And I was really fortunate, because I brought on these great investors, and one of the investors that I brought on had a huge portfolio of companies, and was like, Hey, you weren't so good on the product side. I was like, Yeah, I know. But you were really good at the marketing side. And we have all of these founders that we support that are building incredible products, and they're not great at explaining them, getting people excited about them, selling them. Will you work with some of our companies? And I said, Yes, are you gonna pay me? It's like, I really need money. And yeah. So they're like, Yeah, you can come on as a consultant, and we'll pay you to work with these companies. And so I started working with all of these brilliant founders who were building world changing technology, their clients were like Boeing and NASA and Tesla and like they were changing the world. And I would go and I would sit down at their boardroom tables, and I'd ask them the question that we want to know as marketers, which is, tell me about your customers. And I was really surprised that most of them could not give me a straight answer. They would be like, oh, you know, like we target, you know, entrepreneurs, or, we target companies like this, but also kind of like this, or the founders would be fighting about who the target customer is in the session. And one time, a founder looked at me straight in the face and he said, our target customers are B to B, online businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees.  Rob Marsh: Pretty much every business?  Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So I was like, Okay, there's clearly a problem to be solved here and helping people to better understand their customers. And so I got really nerdy with this problem started, like, hungrily consuming all of the literature that I could. I'm like, why are so many people having this issue where they don't understand their customers? They don't understand the demand that customers have.  And that led me to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta work around jobs to be done, which is kind of a whole other conversation we could get into. And it led me to thinking, I'm going to start an insights agency. I want to build an agency that helps companies understand their customers. Will do customer research on the graph, will feed them insights. They need this information to build successful companies. Well, around this exact same time that I have this big idea like, I want to start generating demand for this. I was doing a lot of consulting work. I was running workshops and training for mostly companies in the innovation space, helping them to better understand their customers. And so I started thinking, okay, I need to start priming people for when I eventually launched the agency. And so I created Why We Buy as a newsletter, basically to build pipeline for a future agency. And that was in 2021 and we'd come through the pandemic. We were figuring out the world again in person. Stuff wasn't happening. It was mostly still virtual. And I found out that I was pregnant, which was exciting, because we've been trying,