I was taking part in a mastermind group a while back and someone asked the question, “Do you like your customers?”
BOOM!
Amazing question.
It had a huge impact on everyone in the room. We all had to pause and think about our own feelings about our customers and even our prospects.
Did we like them? Did we respect them?
Did we even think about our customers in terms of liking or respecting them?
Or did we just see them as anonymous specs within a demographic group? As data points?
In this post I get to interview Value Proposition and Marketing Message Development Expert, Peter Sandeen.
That’s quite the title! But as you get to know Peter, the way he describes his work makes more and more sense.
And while I’ve known some of the people I interview here for 20 plus years, I have known Peter for about 20 days and counting.
Why the interview? Because after spending a little while on his website, and talking with him on the phone, I felt we shared a lot of common ground when it comes to our views on marketing.
That was enough to make me want to do this interview.
Let’s get started.
The best time to build expertise in any area of digital marketing isn’t necessarily at the very beginning.
For example, sites like MySpace were heralding the birth of social media back in the early 2000s.
But it wasn’t until 2006 or so that the big players like Twitter and Facebook took hold.
And many of the big names in social media marketing didn’t get established until about 2009 or 2010.
But after that… well, everyone else who wanted a slice of that market had the play catch-up.
And like I say, playing catch-up sucks. It’s sucks because you’ll always be trying to make yourself heard in a market where the voices of the earlier adopters dominate.
It’s the same story with conversational copywriting right now.
In this post I get to interview Shane Gibson, an international speaker and author on social media marketing, social selling and sales performance.
Shane and I worked together training young entrepreneurs way back in the mid 1990s. A LONG time ago! Since then he has become a huge force in a few different areas, from sales leadership training to social media.
A little while back, instead of just reading one of his tweets, I clicked on it and soon found myself immersed in his videos and podcasts.
Weird thing… although we’ve barely been in contact all these years, it seems like we’ve been travelling along parallel lines.
This is a long and meaty interview, with a ton of powerful takeaways.
I have a homework assignment for you.
I want you to write a few lines promoting a swimming pool safety fence.
I’ll give you a full briefing about the fencing… what it looks like, how it can be installed, taken down, and so on.
And then it will be up to you.
This is one of the 6 homework assignments I give students of my Conversational Copywriting course.
And when I look at all the submissions, I can divide them fairly neatly into two categories.