The Chat with Christine Gomolka - How to Write B2B Messaging That Actually Sells

The Chat with Christine Gomolka

Episode Title: How to Write B2B Messaging That Actually Sells – Christine Gomolka’s Copy Framework

Guest: Christine Gomolka – B2B Copywriter, Former B2B Sales Pro, Creator of Copywriting Courses for Freelancers

Host: Terry Wilson
Podcast: The Chat by ChatMetrics

💡 Episode Overview:

If your website messaging isn’t converting, this episode is for you.

Christine Gomolka shares how she went from B2B tech sales to becoming one of the most strategic copywriters for SaaS and service brands. She reveals the exact messaging frameworks she uses to help companies clarify their positioning, improve conversions, and generate real pipeline.

You’ll learn how to bridge the gap between sales thinking and marketing messaging – and how to avoid the biggest mistakes marketing leaders make when writing copy.

🧠 Topics We Cover:

• Why most B2B websites fail to convert visitors into leads
• Christine’s unique sales-to-copywriting journey (and why it matters)
• Her framework for writing homepage messaging that sells
• How AI is changing copywriting – and how she uses it to speed up results
• StoryBrand, deep customer research, and building a brand script
• Real-world tips for simplifying your message and boosting clarity
• Live site critique ideas and how to apply them to your own marketing
• The “one big idea” marketing leaders should take from this conversation

📣 Who Should Listen:

• CMOs and Marketing Leaders looking to increase website conversion
• B2B SaaS and Services Companies who want messaging that creates pipeline
• Sales and SDR Managers who feel their marketing isn’t speaking their buyer’s language
• Copywriters and Content Marketers curious about frameworks that work
• Anyone building a homepage, funnel, or outbound campaign

00:00- Terry: 

Welcome to the chat, come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies for the past 10 years. As chat metrics. We’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales. Across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies for driving inbound success.

Join us on the chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

So today we’re joined by someone who lives at the intersection of copy and conversions, Christine Gomolka. She started her career in the trenches of B2B software sales, cold calling school

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Districts, and grinding through pipeline pressure before making a bold pivot into copywriting where she quickly became known for her cold email strategies that actually worked.

Since then, she’s written for enterprise tech companies, launched her own copy education business, and built a name mentoring freelancers on how to sell market and land high value clients as a brand messaging strategist, in a world where AI is flooding inboxes with spamy outreach and budgets are tighter than ever.

Christine brings a refreshing mix of empathy, clarity, and a strategic punch. today we’re going to unpack what really makes Copy convert and how to get messaging right, and the one big idea that could transform your website from a bounce machine to a conversion engine. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to The Chat. Christine. Great to have you here.

Christine: 

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited about this conversation.

Terry:

So, my look, and rather than getting into too much background, I wanna jump straight into, one question and then I’ll come back and ask you about a transition.

02:00-

But I really wanna talk about websites.

What’s the number one thing that you would say that most SaaS companies are getting wrong on their homepage?

Christine: 

The number one thing I see with software as a service, which is the, where I’ve done the most of my messaging work and copywriting, is that it’s that hook, and that’s where people struggle the most.

It’s that above the fold, introduction or hook. And I find with SaaS companies specifically, it’s either jargony to the sense where it makes sense to their internal marketing team. Maybe it makes sense within their industry, but to somebody who doesn’t know what they do and they get on the page, it just, it sounds great, but they don’t know what it does.

And because I use something called the StoryBrand framework, we know from a messaging standpoint that if somebody doesn’t understand what a company does within five

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Seconds of first visiting that page. Their brain is exhausting too many calories and they just click off. So you don’t want people to have to decode or decipher what it is your product does and how it helps them.

So that’s number one is just the jargon, the shiny-sounding headline or tagline. And then the other issue is just being way too focused on them and their brand and who they are. And I see that more with small to mid-size businesses, with the big enterprise SaaS company to be too slick to.

Creative to the point where we don’t understand what you do. Then, for small to mid-size businesses, like too self-centered, and that’s what I really help companies do is, yes, let’s learn about you and your company and what you do, but let’s translate that

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Message into how it actually impacts the prospect or the website visitor so that they want to go deeper and keep scrolling on your website.

Terry: 

Okay, so what I’m hearing is that the number one thing most important and that most get wrong is the hook. And then secondly, it’s actually talking about themselves. let’s pause those because I’ll come back and dig right into those. But to move back on now then, to a little bit about where you started.

You’ve gone from B2B Tech sales, which has given you a great foundation and understanding for that whole sales process and understanding the customers to a brand messaging strategist. What was the moment when you realized brand messaging was your superpower?

Christine:

It’s interesting because I segued from being a B2B salesperson into copywriting and copywriting, being a freelancer and working on a contract basis for so many different companies.

What I noticed the

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Biggest problem or throughline was that, yes, people were assigning me work and saying, Write this for me, Write this email, Write this blog post. But without a streamlined core message, that work wasn’t performing. So I’d either get people coming to me saying Hey, we need blog posts.

And then I would take it, take it a step back and say, okay, but do you know what you even want to say? Because if this isn’t all adding up and if this isn’t strategic, we’re gonna be publishing blogs, and that’s great for me because I’m gonna get paid. But if it’s not driving traffic to your site, I don’t wanna do it.

After having so many of those meetings where I’m like, hey, back up. You need to get someone to streamline your message before we start creating content. I moved into that role more naturally, where I was like, let me just help you flesh out what your message actually is, and then we can write content, and then you can hire a whole team that’s gonna

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Write your content, and you’re all going to be singing off the same hymn sheet.

Terry: 

I’m sitting here nodding, smiling, and feeling quite embarrassed as I think about what the hook is on our spread on, on our, website at the moment, on our homepage, and it’s something that we’ll be going through. But, and it. At least I can say that it is probably aligned to most of the content that we’re doing.

I’m in control of most of it, so there’s continuity there. but it’s probably not saying the right thing in terms of what it needs to from, from a client’s perspective. Was there any particular thing that you noticed? Was there ever any resistance you had as you are trying to take that step back from Okay, write a blog to, hang on, there’s a bigger picture that’s missing here.

Is there, was there, something from the client’s perspective that was causing that disconnect?

Christine: 

Yeah, so if we’re just sticking with SAS examples, I would say. The two biggest points of pushback I get is that there’s a marketer or a CEO when

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I tell them, Hey, we need to sit back and do this strategy work before we start producing blogs.

It wasn’t what they necessarily wanted to hear because they heard from somewhere, Hey, we need to start publishing blogs. And they just want to do the activity. even if it means not getting the result, because they were so fixated on, Hey, we just want this deliverable. So that’s always gonna be, an issue.

There’s writers who are just gonna take that business and say, you tell me to write it and I will do it. But in my opinion, that’s how you get replaced because if the content isn’t working or performing, you’re eventually gonna be out of a job anyway. So I don’t like to do that. And then. The second, I would say, point of pushback for SaaS specifically, ’cause I’ve worked with so many enterprise companies, is that marketing teams within SaaS companies can be very bloated.

There is a demand gen team, there is a content

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Marketing team, there is an inbound team and SDR team and the message and getting those departments on the same page can be really tough. So when I come in and I’m talking to A CMO and I’m talking about messaging, but the website is created entirely by the demand gen team, that disconnect and those silos.

Makes it nearly impossible for me to actually penetrate the company and get in there and get everything streamlined. So those are just some of the challenges I see specifically with these like large organizations when it comes to messaging,

Terry:

There’s, there’s two points I’ll take away from what you’ve said.

The first one was the fact, and I think it’s why you and I kicked. Kicked off so well clicked so well when we first chatted was that we both have a focus on delivering value. We’ll walk away from a job rather than take it knowing that it’s not really gonna deliver the right outcome for a client. So that, that,kudos to you for that.

09:00-

I think that’s, there’s plenty that don’t I get, let’s just leave it there. as far as the second point around silos, it is incredible. One of the things that we see often when we first start up with a client, it’ll be that our touch point to start with is the marketing team. They own the website generally.

but we act as an extension to the sales team. And so we are operating under sales as well. So we’ve got this two way conversation going and I’ve literally sat in meetings where you can see the friction in the air. you could cut the air with a knife between the sales leader and the marketing leader as we’re having the conversations about the leads that are coming and doing some of the preparation work.

But it’s so delightful to see over time that as the sales guys are seeing the outcome or the sales team seeing the outcome of what marketing is now built in terms of taking on board our services, that you see that friction start to disappear and there’s a much closer

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Working together, so to speak, and those silos start to come down.

Have you seen something similar with what you do as you’re starting to work across a client and then start to bring the messaging through all the way, I guess I should ask then, how do you manage those projects? Do you run them and communicate across the entire business or do you facilitate somebody else to do that?

what’s, your mode of operation?

Christine: 

Yeah. It really depends how much access my client is gonna give me to people internally in the company. I’ve had clients, mostly content marketers and chief marketing officers or who contracts me, and sometimes they’ll be like, Hey, get on a call with our CEO and interview him, get on a call with our customer success manager or whatever and interview him.

Other times they’re more organized in the sense that they have recorded interviews, they have everything compiled for me. So it’s a matter of me just sitting there reading it. So it’s

11:00-

Interesting, I work with. I work with so many different scenarios in terms of the content marketer that’s very dialed in.

He has all the information compiled in spreadsheets, and I’m just consuming the information. Sometimes I have to get scrappy and get on calls and actually interview people myself, and sometimes information just doesn’t exist and I have to look at competitors. I have to go deep in whatever forums. People are voicing their pain points and desires and do all that work that legwork just independently of them.

And that all depends on just what’s going on internally in a company and what they have already in terms of resources and assets.

Terry: 

And initiatives. Often there’ll be other projects that they’re working on that’s taking up all of their resources at the time.

Christine: 

And it’s gonna get easier though for content marketers as time goes by.

I’m actually in a beta testing group right now with a software that compiles voice of the customer

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With the click of a button. It’ll scrape, which Terry, this would be great for you and I to have a side conversation about, because it literally scrapes a company’s entire online presence. All of their G2 reviews, everything that can be found about a company, it’ll scrape it and put it into a voice of customer docs so that you can really see like pain points, desires, why someone chose to work with a company, objections, all that good stuff.

And it’s like click of a button. AI as a whole conversation in and of itself, but that stuff’s becoming way more accessible,

Terry:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you. if marketers are trying to drive pipeline today, and this is getting back onto the first question, again, but the, aside from the hook, obviously because people land and they see that hook and then consistency is the first thing.

where’s the next biggest mistake as far as the copy or the overall messaging in the website is concerned?

13:00- Christine:

Are we still on the website or more just ’cause there’s so many issues that can go into, are we talking about messaging in general? Are we talking about converting leads? You’re talking about a website?

let’s

Terry:

Start, let’s go back firstly to the website and let’s talk about the hook. What you mentioned that the hook has to be, clear. Can you give us, your framework or steps through in terms of what it is that makes an ideal hook for a website? Yeah,

Christine: 

So I use something called the StoryBrand Framework by Donald Miller.

It’s great for small to medium-sized businesses. I wish more enterprise software companies were using it because then they wouldn’t have those generic above the fold, hooks that are more sounding like brand taglines, Nike, just do it, versus we want to get signups for our software. But, in the StoryBrand framework,

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Step one is a character or the hero.

And the, what the hero is just identifying who your target audience is and what their primary desire is. In other words, what they want, what they’re looking for. And people get this wrong, meaning software companies, SaaS companies, tech companies, they get this wrong because they think we are the hero.

Like so and so.com, I’m the character, I’m the hero, and this is what we do. The hero is the customer, the hero. In order for them to enter the story that you’re going to tell, they have to see themselves and their journey. So by identifying who that person is and what their desire is, that’s what makes a compelling hook.

And it has to be pretty simple to the extent where you’re like, this isn’t very impressive. And that’s what a lot of marketers and even founders might get a little bit hung up on as well, is this

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Doesn’t sound slick or smart, but simplicity always wins in these situations because again, we want people to understand what you do and keep scrolling onto the next section of the page.

So the other big pushback, or the other issue that happens with above the fold, is that.

They want to speak to multiple target personas. So when I get with a CEO or a founder and I say, Who is your one target persona and their one desire, that’s a very complex conversation because a lot of businesses serve multiple verticals. They serve multiple customer avatars. And boiling that down into one person for that homepage becomes very difficult because they’re like, I don’t, there’s so many people, but your website can speak to multiple

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People, just not in that, above the fold.

So that’s why if anyone’s listening to this and you’re like, Ooh, that’s my problem, yes, that’s all of our problem. That’s, it’s hard for every single one of us, and that’s why it, you have to bring someone. In from the outside, who’s unbiased, who’s going to give you those edits? Because even my marketing coach, because I sell and market my own products, it’s the same conversation every time I submit my landing page, submit my homepage to her, she’ll say, I really like this tagline, but is this what your customer really wants?

Is this how they would phrase it? And I always have her voice in the back of my head when I’m writing copy to be like, yes, I like the way this sounds, but is this what they really want? Is this what they’re looking

Terry: 

For? I’m beginning to hate this conversation. I wanna go and take my website down immediately.

Christine: 

I know it, it can be like convicting and confronting and like shots fired, but

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It’s the hardest part for everyone. It really is. And that’s why if you talk to any copywriter, they’ll tell you. They’ll start with something up there above the fold. They’ll write the entire page, but then they come back to the above the fold and continue to tweak and revise, because that’s hook writing.

Whether it’s an email subject line, whether it’s the title of a blog post. It’s the hardest part and it requires the most work.

Terry:

I think it would be easier. If I didn’t believe you already know what you’re telling me. I realized that, for us in particular, I’ve got a fancy hook on there that was really tried to grab some curiosity and some intrigue, but that’s not the place to be doing that.

I, I need to do that through the messaging to get people to come to the homepage. The homepage needs to be telling them,of their, how, what their problems are that we solve and who we solve them for. Really, that’s the in essence,

Christine:

And you know what,

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It’s AB testing, right? Because I can have the best assumption of what I think you’re above the fold should be.

But unless you’re testing it and seeing what converts, none of it matters. So that’s the thing about marketing, is that. It’s not just like one guru out there is like a marketing genius. It’s just somebody who literally AB tested and C and saw for themselves what had the highest conversion rate

Terry: 

For themselves.

Experiment in their market. In new market. Yeah.

Christine: 

Yeah. it’s total experiment.

Terry: 

So the StoryBrand framework, you’ve spoken about that, component. Do you wanna run us through the whole framework and tell us how Yeah. How you leverage that?

Christine: 

Yeah. So I’m gonna give a quick rundown of the StoryBrand framework.

Read Donald Miller’s book. You can even get certified as like a StoryBrand guide. But I didn’t wanna invest $10,000 in that certification because I can just do it for clients. But, it’s a character that has, first of all, let me explain to you the basis of the StoryBrand

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Framework to understand why it matters.

So Donald Miller, before he became a marketer, was. Like a novelist and a screenwriter. And what he discovered was that there’s a reason why we get sucked into movies, right? We’re all having these short attention spans. We have the TikTok brain, but if we go to the right movie that hooks us, we are zoned in for three hours without looking at our phone and we’re lost.

Like we lose sense of ourselves and we’re sucked in. And as marketers and business owners, we want people to stay on our websites, to keep reading whatever we sent them to grab their attention. So he took that concept of what makes a movie or a story. Captivating and interesting and how do we infuse that into a marketing message, right?

and story is something that’s very primal to humans, to our psychology. That’s what we were doing when we were dancing around like a fire as cavemen and

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Storytelling, before we had writing, before we had the printing press, that was our most primal way of consuming information and passing on information.

So that’s what this framework is based off of, and I like that. ’cause it’s with marketing and sales, there’s always something new. There’s always something trendy. There’s always spin, selling challenge, selling this. But if you can really know the basics and what triggers people psychologically, you’ll always be doing something right and getting results.

So that’s why I gravitate towards Donald Miller’s marketing framework and. He breaks it down in the seven part framework. And this is also how I model a customer or a client’s homepage. So it’s a character that’s step one. That’s what we talked about, where it’s who are you talking to and what do they want?

And then number two is their problem, right? External, internal philosophical depends what industry you’re in terms of problems. In marketing, we call it pain points. And the reason

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Why pain points are so important and problems are so important in sales and marketing is because we don’t do anything unless we are prompted by pain.

That’s just the reality, right? Like we are, we like homeostasis, we like things the way they are. And the only time we are prompted to take an action or make a big change is because it hurts in some way, right? I’m gonna try to lose weight because not just, oh, I wanna lose weight. It’s, I don’t wanna look bad in photos anymore.

I don’t wanna be embarrassed of myself in a bathing suit. There’s problems that prompt us to buy things, to change things, to read things, all of that stuff.

Terry: 

Did you pick that, particular topic for some reason? Mahar a little bit too much.

Christine: 

Actually, I’m in the middle of a weight, a weight loss journey.

I am down 6.4 pounds and I have five pounds to go. And for me, I think looking at how weight loss programs and

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Nutritionists and trainers, how they market themselves is very enlightening, right? I always look at other industries that have nothing to do with what I’m doing to pick up tips and say, Oh, that’s really good the way they did that.

So no, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s everything to do with me.

Terry:

Okay. Congratulations on that achievement. And that just as a quick aside, that’s a very valid point in that, I’ve recently, spoken with Julian, who was on the website, this week actually just been published, and she’s from B2C.

She’s from, brands, big brands, and she’s moved to, into a business, to business. And the insights that she’s bringing from consumer brands into a business to business is very interesting. that being able to look outside of the box that you’re in at the moment. I think it, yeah, the insights you can gain from that are incredible.

Christine: 

Yes. And I love that because I think the way things are moving is that B2B is

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Going to start acting more B2C as things get quicker, and as sales processes accelerate, which, I’m sure because with being in the chat bot, having that face-to-face, human to human interaction,it’s not, I would say B is shifting to a more B2C like sales and marketing process.

But that’s like a whole other episode. But, okay. Step three is meets a guide. So that’s where you position your business as the person or the product or the solution that can help them. So that’s where things like your testimonials, your case studies, right? It’s all about proving like, Hey, I know who you are and what you want.

Here’s your problem, right? We agitate their problem and then we position ourselves as the guide, the person who knows how to solve their problem and who they should trust to guide them on that journey. Step four is to give them a plan.

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Give them a plan. Is any website you go to and it’ll say, here’s how you do business with us.

Step one, fill out our form. Step two, do this. Step three, do this. If you can break out your entire process into three to four steps and summarize them, what it does psychologically is it bridges the gap between them not knowing. How you can help them or what that process will look like to them, having a sense of safety and predictability.

Oh, okay. When I click that call to action button, I’m gonna be led to a form, and I’m eventually gonna get on a call with somebody. Believe it or not, that’s really important for somebody who’s just on your website and you’re wanting to keep them there. You’re wanting them to actually click the buttons, click those calls to action.

They need to know what comes next. And that’s another issue that I have with a lot of clients is that getting them to summarize their process into three to four steps when they say,no, Christine, we have a very

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Lengthy process and we do this, and we do the like, especially in the IT space, they’ll be like, we need this evaluation.

And I’m like,no. We need to keep it simple just for this page. Okay, so then number five is

Terry:

This. Just as an a point there as well. It’s interesting that nearly every single, not 100%, but close to it, of, the clients that we talk to all say, but our service, our offering is so complicated.

You’ll never be able to provide the service. You’ll never be able to learn about our product. they all say the same thing to start with, and it’s really interesting that, you’re talking about breaking it down to a simple couple of steps so that the website visit or prospect, really your potential client can get their head from their pain being unsolved at the moment to, it’s not a huge project, it’s only a few small steps to get to a point where it could be having this problem solved.

exactly. I think that’s very interesting. Yeah. we’ll talk after this, so

Christine:

Yeah. yeah. And what you said exactly. For someone to be like, our program is so

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Complicated, you’ll never be able to explain it. Don’t let the customer know that, okay, we don’t want the customer to think that there’s any complexity.

We want them to think it’s very easy, which is, the value in that. So the call to action. So again, calls to action are an art form in and of itself, just like hook writing. people tend to go two ways. It’s way too bland, or it’s so creative where we’re like, what is gonna happen when I click that button?

So it really just has to blend in with the rest of the page. It could be something as simple as book a call, download a free guide, but we want those calls to action strategically placed throughout a homepage or a landing page so that at any given moment, when they are triggered, at any point in that page, they’re able to click and get to where they wanna go.

Number six, step six is. Ends in success. So that’s when you describe the positive outcome that your customer is gonna get once they’ve

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Undergone the transformation. in marketing, we’ll call that like painting a picture of their future where they can step into that vision of what does my life look like once I pursue their services?

I get the desired outcome that we opened all this up with. What does my life look like? And when you can paint that picture for them, it’s very compelling. ’cause that’s really why they’re there. They’re not to do, not there to do business with your lovely company. They’re there to solve their problem and get to that end goal and vision.

And then step seven is help them avoid failure, right? That is where you highlight the negative consequences of them not doing business with you and them not taking action. So we talked about that before,here’s the problem, here’s why it hurts. But here’s also what’s gonna happen if you don’t take action.

So I know in like the coaching world or whether you’re

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Selling education products, we’ll say things like. If you just keep going with what you’re doing today, where are you gonna be a year from now? So you don’t take any act, even if you’re in fitness or weight loss or consumer fitness, that this could be, a help ’em avoid failure section.

Okay? So keep doing what you’re doing today. You’re spitting in circles. You’re not losing weight. You keep binge eating. you keep, keeping your step count below 5,000. Where do, what does that look like a year from now if you don’t do anything about that problem? So not only do you paint a successful future if you, if they do business with you, but you press urgency by saying, This is how bad the problem can get if you don’t do something about this today.

’cause we all need a little bit of a push, a little bit of that urgency. So that is the seven-part StoryBrand framework.

Terry: 

Thank you. Enlightening. Look, it’s very interesting. We talk about pain.

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And moving towards an outcome. It’s the, from a psychological perspective, really it’s pain and pleasure, isn’t it?

will move towards pleasure and away from pain. That’s just the natural direction. We’ll move in. But I think the reality is with human beings that. We will run away from pain and only walk towards pleasure. We’ve heard too many promises in the past that haven’t necessarily been fulfilled or haven’t taken all the right steps to achieve.

But if there’s pain there, then we want to get away from that pretty quickly. And so we’ll take the steps faster to avoid the pain. And I think that’s been one of the challenges in messaging that I’ve seen,over the last two years, particularly in the tech space, you mentioned the pain points.

Everyone seems to drill in so deeply and twist the knife so deeply in the pain points. I think sometimes you forget that, you know that it’s a sprinkling. It depends more about the level of awareness that client is of their problem or that prospect is of their problem, compared to how much educating or twisting the knife you need to do about, they know

30:00-

They’ve got it, then it’s more about the solution.

If they don’t know they’ve got it, then obviously it’s more about the problem. And it’s, there’s a lot of nuances I think, when it comes to, and that’s, you mentioned before, the importance of digging right down into and understanding that voice of customer and your buyer, that buyer’s profile and researching and understanding who it is that you’re actually talking to, who your audience is, who’s that ideal client profile and as,

Christine:

And understanding where they are in their buying process and creating content and messaging that.

It hits them at every part of the funnel, because you’re right, somebody at the top of the funnel is not going to have the same pain points, desires necessarily as somebody who’s on the edge of pulling the trigger and they’re at the bottom of the funnel. So that’s the other part of it, too, that the nuance.

Terry: 

I’m gonna ask you a question, and I feel that you might just say to me, Look, it’s the same as I answered before, but if someone has only time to rewrite one section of their

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Website this week, where should they focus for maximum impact?

Christine: 

What problem are they having most? I would ask okay, so if I, if it’s just a client coming to me saying if I could just change one part of my website, what would it be?

I would have to know what part? Conversions.

Terry: 

Conversions. They’ve got traffic coming. Okay. But they’re not converting. Because that’s the biggest challenge, for, I think for most marketers, they’ve got, if they’ve got a budget and they’re doing activities, I talk about budget.

Even those organizations that are only doing cold outbound and not doing any marketing at all have website visitors. As soon as somebody reaches out, they’re reaching out to their ideal client profile. Now, in that audience will be everybody from those ready to buy that have got the pain to completely unaware and happy on the journey they’re on at the moment.

But the ones that are interested and have enough curiosity to actually check you out, the first place they go

32:00-

To is check your LinkedIn personally or check your website for the offer. We’re sitting on clients that have got two and 300 visitors a month and delivering 10 15 leads a month out of their ICP.

They’re only doing outbound, but it’s only their ICP that’s coming to their website. We’ve got other clients. We’re sitting on 350, 400,000 visitors a month and delivering 50 or 60 leads because they’ve had this whole SEO campaign going that’s driving a big chunk of traffic, which is great. But as far as their ICP, it’s only a very small percentage of that overall traffic.

So I, I know that’s a little bit of a digression, but I think that if, assuming all things being equal that it’s a marketing campaign, they’ve been running good SEO, they’ve got decent organic traffic as well as some paid traffic. It’s coming through, the majority of their, traffic is coming from the right sources and the bounce, their bounce rates are reasonable 35%.

It’s not like people are spending two seconds on the website and running away. What would you say would be the one thing that they should be focused on in terms of

33:00-

Getting a conversion to get people to take that final step and actually take an action?

Christine: 

I would say the problem section of the website, which is just below the fold, right?

So we talked a lot about why that hook is so important, and it allows the prospect to see themselves, see themselves in the story, and kind of register that they’re in the right place. But let’s say, like you said, they’re in a campaign. They got, a direct message, they got an outbound message, and there’s other signals that brought them to this page to let them know that they were in the right place.

If they can see that you directly solve their problem, and they can see themselves and hear themselves in the way you articulate the problem, that can remedy a horrible tagline or a horrible hook because they’re like, okay, I don’t really understand what this first line means. But once they get to the problem section and said, Are you

34:00-

Struggling with do this?

It will, I would say, pique their curiosity enough where they’ll take you up on your call to action. Oh yes, I have that problem. I’ll download that free guide, or I’ll book this call.

Terry: 

Because that’s really getting to the crux of the matter, isn’t it? The reason they’re there is because they’re trying to solve a problem.

Christine:

Exactly. Exactly. And I would just say that in marketing in general, when we hear people articulate our problems in the same way that we are voicing those problems, it captures us immediately. It makes us listen up. Yeah. that is what I’m struggling with. I don’t know why that is, but once we feel understood in that way by the company, everything else Can be forgiven, if that makes sense.

Terry:

Yeah. Look, I think that’s true. I call it being heard, you hear me, you hear me, you understand my position. it’s a lesson I had very early on from my father. He always used

00:35:00-

To say to me, son, before you try and convince anybody to do anything, walk a mile in their shoes.

Yeah.

Christine: 

Yeah. And that’s a great, great lesson for anyone in the sales profession is listening is so important.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. So of the, out of the story brand process, how long does it usually take once you’ve completed a project, so to speak, and made the adjustments to messaging?

How quickly do you start to see results?

Christine:

With my clients, I’m typically brought in on the front end. Then they move on to working with a web designer. So are you talking about from the time the copy goes live? Live? That’s right.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. so it’s like you’ve o you’ve obviously, you’ll come and put together the entire, strategy, the overall branding and messaging.

All of that then has to be executed from point of execution. How quickly do you start to see results?

Christine: 

It really depends on

36:00-

What the client’s strategy is, right? Because it depends how they’re driving traffic. If they’re, if they actually have an outbound sales motion, it could be, within days, weeks, if they’re relying on SEO and blogs, that is a long play that could take six months to a year to really ramp up and be generating consistent traffic.

So me. Fleshing out their message and getting that core brand messaging script, we’ll call it, that’s one part of an entire ecosystem. It’s really what the client does with that message. Next, it’s okay, so how many people in organization are going to get that script so they can start changing how they talk about the company?

The social media manager needs it. The demand gen team, who’s writing the email campaigns, they need this messaging. Even customer service or sales reps they need

37:00

That messaging as well. So I would just say it so highly depends, and it’s also a lot out of my control as a contractor because it’s what the company does with that messaging that ultimately matters most.

Terry: 

I get it. I get it. it’s really about, it’s on them to execute and their particular channels and overall marketing strategy.

Christine: 

Exactly, or else it’s just words on a page. At the end of the day, it’s once you have the words on the page, you have to be generating traffic and actually get those words, the visibility, and that’s where all these other marketing channels come into play.

Terry:

So in your experience with the clients you’ve worked with, how much of poor performance is copy, bad copy, versus a poor offer?

Christine: 

Poor performance. In what sense? Like disappointing sales or like lack of conversions with leads.

38:00- Terry: 

lack of Conversions. I guess again, that’s the point that I’ll always focus on getting someone that’s, you’ve spent, invested all of the,your time, energy and resources into coming to a website to consuming your content, to getting to a point where this is now where they should click that button and book a meeting or when they should.

So I’m actually talking to get them, getting them into the pipeline, whether they’re a prospect. do you, how much in your experience is the copy issue versus an offer issue? you’re gonna have the best copy in the world. You get people to convert, but if you’ve got a bad offer, they’re not gonna turn into sales.

I guess the question for me is there a point where, look, this, have you had an experience where, look, this business, this offer really is just not. there’s no demand for it, I guess is the way to point it. You can’t start a business and sell where there’s no demand. You can’t create demand. As much as we talk about demand, gender, and demand creation, it’s more demand diversion.

There has to be a problem that people want solved and you can, and they’re solving another way at the moment, whether it’s with spreadsheets or rubber bands or duct tape.

39:00-

And you’ve got a different solution. You’d really, diverting that, demand. So there are some offers and products obviously that don’t, there’s not a lot of demand for.

Have you had any experience with those at all?

Christine: 

Yeah, it’s hard to tell from my end because what’s interesting is that I find that. A bad offer with the right message can still make a lot of traction. And in the SaaS world specifically, because I’ve worked with like early stage startups, they iterate as they get into these customers and find out what they like.

And then it really becomes a matter of how do we retain these customers? Like at what point can we nurture them more so that they’re not canceling their subscription? So like I work with a lot of businesses that have a subscription model. So I don’t know, I guess I’m biased, but I see everything through a messaging standpoint because

40:00-

There’s great products out there, but if the messaging isn’t there, a lot of people won’t use it.

Whereas there’s not great products out there that are mediocre, but because they have this, s. Following or great branding or the right message, they catch on and they’re profitable and they grow their customer base. So I’m of the belief that the right messaging to the right person at the right time matters more than you having the best thing on the block.

Terry: 

I’m a hundred percent aligned in my experience and I’ve got a little bit of grey in my beard now. I’ve seen it where, a good marketer will outsell a good product any day of the week, any day of the week. And we’ve seen even in our industry some, amazing things that I’ve watched, from a afar and seen how the growth has been.

skyrocketing valuations are skyrocketing. And then I’ll look and see where things settled today. And it’s what a

41:00-

Disaster. it was actually the product itself initially was very good, but then it iterated into something that was quite terrible, to the extent where, the original founders at the point in time that they exited, everything was good.

But then things change and, strategies change and so forth and offer changes. But, anyway. Look, I’m with you a hundred percent there. I think there’s,my business partner will say to me when we’re looking at something and having a look at how they’re marketing it versus what the product is and pardon the French, but he’ll say Shit sells.

it’s it does. if you’ve got the right messaging, you’d be surprised what you can, what you can get people to do. So I think absolutely the messaging is the, is key critical component, and particularly for those, small, smaller startup type businesses, small business, full stop.

If you don’t have the right messaging, then cashflow dries and the business dies. It’s a sim simple equation with the right messaging, the point you made about having that opportunity to at least get some clients and understand if they’re not, even, if, even if they’re not

42:00-

Satisfied, to be able to understand what is important to, they can iterate.

And you might find that in 12 months, 24 months time, a business is entirely different offer to what it was yesterday. I’ve seen that with, a player in our market that virtually started off doing what we are doing, but with ai, rather than having real people sitting in there and then they’ve completely pivoted to, rather than from a lead gen perspective completely to a customer support perspective.

And so they’ve realized that from using AI to engage, we’ve all heard the thing about ai, SDRs and so forth, that there’s much more demand from the customer support side. with the AI chat bots and so forth. So we’ve watched that pivot happen, over the course of about four or five months, I think, as they started to hit the market.

So it was really interesting to watch that. But that messaging to give the business an opportunity to be able to understand what’s important to the customer is critical. I’m with you a hundred percent, I think, messaging all day, all night.

Christine: 

Terry, it’s also about positioning, too, right?

43:00-

Because there’s messaging, but there’s also, it’s how you message it, but it’s how it’s positioned in the market too. at the end of the day, like a Chanel bag is also made in China in the same factory as something that you can get at Walmart. But it has this brand perception, this positioning, and even with chat metrics, it’s there’s what you do and then there’s, a HubSpot AI chat agent.

And it’s just a matter of positioning what you do to solve a specific type of issue. Because you’re not going to get the quality or the conversion rate from an AI chat bot agent sitting on someone’s site that you would from a live rep that interacts with you in the moment. And like we had this conversation when we first spoke, people talk like reckless to a chat bot until they realize it’s a person.

Like I get so much garbage

44:00-

Coming through my site, and I’ll just like type back like a human. They’re like, oh, okay. I didn’t realize this was like a real thing. So it’s helping people to understand like, Hey, yes, you can do this automated AI thing, and you’re gonna get this result. And if you want, that’s fine, but if you’re looking for a conversion here.

Who really understands your business? Someone who’s gonna be there, actually guiding customers through the process. This is where we sit. And that’s how you get away from competing with these, like others, whether if you’re in a saturated market, you don’t have to compete with just the cheapest thing.

Terry:

That’s right. That’s right. I’ve got a great idea. Let’s, let’s turn the next part of this session into a full review and rebuild the chat matrix website. No, I’m kidding. Put me

Christine:

On the spot.

Terry: 

That’d be, that would actually be, a very good, I think that would be a very good piece of content to go through and record a full breakdown of your process from start to finish as you’re

45:00-

Doing it live.

So we might chat about that later. yeah, and Terry,

Christine:

That’s the thing about my process too, is that I take what the business owner or the executives within a company everything that they’ve experienced. In their business, everything they’re hearing from customers. That’s the most important part of all of this.

And when I’m in a conversation with a founder, CEO, I can pull that out of somebody in a way that you’re not gonna get from, oh, having ChatGPT, write Your homepage. There’s just something that happens when you’re talking to a human and who’s asking you pointed questions about the customer journey.

Things are going to, light bulbs are going to come on and you’re gonna say, you know what? Actually ,people have told me this, and this problem. I keep hearing this issue. And when I can pull that out of a founder, a business owner, that’s when really compelling messaging can come from those conversations.

46:00- Terry: 

It’s interesting. We will, we’ll switch topics slightly and we’ll start to have a bit of a chat about AI and the current environment. But one thing that I am hearing a lot, recently is that live chat doesn’t work. Live chat just doesn’t work. They’ve tried it, we’ve tried it, we’ve had chat bots before.

It just doesn’t work. Five, $5 billion in pipeline, which is what we’ve delivered. Can’t be wrong. So we know it works and we know where it works and there are some places where it doesn’t work. But, had an interesting conversation this morning with a chief marketing officer who said that they keep a very close eye on the engagement with their chat bot.

Across their ICP and their ICP just doesn’t engage with chat. it turns out we’ve got another customer that deals with the same ICP and they’ve got a fairly high conversion rate through their live chat. And when I pointed that out, he was a little bit perplexed and I think he didn’t believe me to start with an opt out.

47:00-

The difference is your experience and with non-engagement is with a chat bot that the very first thing it’s asking for is your name and email address. Of course there’s not gonna be much engagement with that if the first experience that you can give, and I said, you should test this, turn the chatbot off and have one of your teams sit in there and see what the difference is.

I’ll have a chat with him tomorrow and see how that ended up. He said he was gonna do it today, so we’ll see how that goes. but that’s the type of thing that people know, dunno what they don’t know, and they’ll form all of their opinions based on their experience. The idea of messaging is trying to get them to understand that there’s another experience that they haven’t had yet, and that it’s not too far away for them being able to experience that and that new outcome.

yeah. True.

Christine: 

Yeah. And it’s also just about marketers always following what the norm is. I would just encourage anybody, so if every company is asking for your email address and your name as the first

48:00-

Conversation starter within the chatbot. Don’t do it, I like that you suggested. Hey, just try this different approach.

Because, unfortunately, a lot of companies just say, This is the standard and how it’s done. But then that places a roadblock in getting those conversations started. It limits the lead flow, but no one thinks to just remove that one barrier, ’cause they’re like, this is what’s done in the industry.

If you go to our competitor’s website, it’s pro. We need to capture their email, we need to capture their name. But it really, it’s putting people off and actually stopping them from engaging in a further conversation that could lead to a sales conversation.

Terry: 

Look, it’s even worse than that because the vendors themselves that sell the software, that live chat and chat bot software actually recommend that’s what they do up front to capture it.

it’s it’s virtually like a form fill. It’s what they recommend to do to catch up front when it’s so far away from what actually works, it’s not funny. I have empathy for every single marketer out there that’s struggling with

49:00-

Chatbots at the moment because they’ve been told to do that.

They look around, everybody else is doing that. It seems like it’s the right thing to do when this is one of those times when everybody’s zigging, you should be zagging and

Christine: 

Anyway. especially when people have become a little bit fatigued with how the sales process has been. And that’s why I do predict that things are gonna start moving fast, that sales processes are gonna start to emulate B2C versus these long, drawn-out B2B processes.

Because how many of us have downloaded an ebook and then all of a sudden we’re getting a sales message from a sales rep, and it’s wait, what? I don’t even remember downloading this, let alone wanting to take a meeting with a rep. When the end, when the prospect or the web visitor is used to the sales process and they’re fatigued and they’re a little bit jaded, that’s when that comes into a place where they’re not wanting to enter their name and email because they might just not wanna get hit with that message at the moment.

50:00- Terry:

Look insightful, that’s this whole piece about the dark funnel. all this research is being done up. They’re now saying that over 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before they reach out to an organization.

And that’s why, because we’ve forced them through our persistent, chasing them all over the place, whether it’s via email or retargeting ’em through marketing on Facebook or across their socials, when, they’re relaxing in their spare time. they just get so sick of knowing that if they click on a link, I’m just gonna see this everywhere for the next two or three weeks.

Where people avoid it almost at all costs until they’re absolutely certain. And by the time that they’re clicking, contacting a company, to virtually down to the last, last three on the list, they, and probably happy to go with either of them. So then it becomes more about their experience that they have on the way through,

It’s,it’s, we’ve created the monster now we’ve gotta try and deal with it. Yeah. It’s interesting. I, Very smart marketer said to me that, here’s a question, Terry,

51:00-

Can you own seven? Do you afford can, do you have the budget to own 70% of the buyer’s journey? And it’s of course not.

They’re in so many different places, whether it’s Slack channels or communities or G2 Capterra, all the other places that they go to, and you can’t be everywhere. And they say, that’s the point now. So you’ve gotta pick your mark, find out the ones that you do wanna be involved in, and how you’re gonna be there.

And in my mind, it’s through messaging and content that’s the main place. sure you can have a few employees stalking some of these Slack groups, but when it’s all said and done, it’s gonna be the overall messaging and, word of mouth on referrals is where is what will make the bigger difference back then there.

Yeah. So brings me to another point. I think there’s been a lot of. Change in the market, particularly I think around, this whole messaging and content piece with ai, with budget constraints, and even layoffs now more recently. how are you evolving your

52:00-

Business in 25 and through into 26?

Christine: 

Yeah, for me personally, it’s been a shift from just marketing myself as a copywriter. The person who delivers the thing, to actually, Hey, I’m going to help you with strategy and higher-level thinking, right? Because that’s really what the robot can’t do at this point, is have that analytical. it can do strategy, but it’s just not gonna get the nuances.

And I would say that the drawback of relying on AI to do the strategy work is that you are just gonna wind up sounding like everyone else. And I think that’s the biggest drawback. So AI is going to, I think, allow teams to get leaner. But it can’t replace certain functions. And I think as someone who’s been doing this since 2019 and saw all

53:00-

Of this, go down, and I’m seeing the way things are going, for me, it’s about positioning myself as someone who is not just delivering and an order taker, but more involved in higher-level strategy and allowing them to execute.

Whether you’re going to use a bot to do the writing, that core message that you decide on has to be. Done with a little bit of heart and soul still,

Terry:

So in essence, what you are saying is that you are taking all of the skills that you used to use to deliver a piece of content now and sharing that across it in organ, an organization to help them with their overall branding and messaging and positioning in the marketplace.

Christine: 

Exactly, because something that’s really big in content right now is repurposing and taking one piece of content and spinning it out to 50 different pieces of content across a few

54:00-

Select platforms. Being in different places, showing up., ’cause people need to hear these messages over and over again to actually be sold to.

But instead of starting everything from scratch, your best bet is to get the most mileage out of the content that’s created. I think that everyone should be doing video right now, and I think repurposing video-based content into text-based content, clip-based content, that’s. The most efficient way to do that.

So the way that I’m approaching companies now is saying, let’s get clear on your brand script. What is your message? And that should really start with your homepage on your website. That should be your home base where your message really lives. And then all the content can really stem from that core messaging that you’ve decided on.

And that’s it’s I guess it’s your home base where everybody in the company can go to this website and

55:00-

Say, oh, this is how we’re speaking to people right now, and here’s how we can repurpose this message into all these different formats. But when the core message isn’t there, that’s why companies sound different in different places.

Or you have people talking about the company in way, in very different ways.

Terry: 

Yes. Yes. Just yes. We’ve started doing exactly that, where now my core content tends to be video, this podcast in fact. and we’ll start to breach out and we’ll do a blog and we’ll do all the other snippets and social posts. And it’s interesting. I hate social media, I just hate it, and really it’s do we wanna be on TikTok?

Are any of our clients on TikTok or pot potential clients on TikTok? Reality is there’s probably more likely that our clients are on TikTok than Facebook or Instagram, quite

56:00-

Frankly. that that’s where my head’s at the moment. I think that,that, the way it’s been adopted and there’s a little bit of a B2B presence now on, on, on TikTok.

it’s interesting. But AI helps us, and we spoke there before about some of the tools we use. what’s your thoughts on AI copy threat tool or both?

Christine: 

I think it’s both. I think AI is gonna become a legitimate threat to every industry, though, whether that’s a therapist, a photographer, so if we’re talking like ultimate end game, where I see AI going is not in a good direction because we’ve gone from technological advances that have helped us with some day-to-day things and making life a bit easier to now we have this thing that is an existential threat and is going to replace humans in a lot of ways.

57:00-

I think like, just end game, the majority of the population is gonna be unemployed and we are gonna be forced to provide universal basic income. I don’t think people are going to starve and die and humanity is gonna I think we’re going to not maybe,so the way I see it is that people are going to have their life facilitated to them, at a very low cost because we’re gonna replace so much human labor that costs a certain amount of money with robots, right?

So we will be able to live off of less money. So if you see policy that is pushing universal basic income, it’s because we are moving in that direction where the majority of the population is actually gonna be out of work. And what society will look like when that happens will be the question.

58:00

So if we’re just gonna go way forward, that’s where I ultimately see it. But for now, in terms of marketing and ai, it’s just making lives easier. It’s going to help people do work faster. It’s going to allow people to run leaner teams. I think people are going to spin off and do their own things.

It’s gonna be, Hey, here’s me and my ai and here’s how we’re bringing value to the market. That’s like the short term. But in terms of where it’s going end game, it’s going to change everything. It’s going to change humanity. But I don’t want to know if we wanna get that deep on this. It could be the antichrist,

Terry:

Not today, but that, I think that’s, that’s actually a very good topic to delve in on another conversation For sure.

No doubt. No doubt. I’ve got some, perspectives on that as well. Interesting. Interesting. So I’ll look, I’m with you. I think it’s both. AI in copywriting at the moment is that both

59:00-

Facilitator, it can help,with a lot of things. unless you’re very careful with it. You do, and you made this point earlier, you will end up sounding just like everybody else. And the reason for that is that AI learns from everything. And so what it puts out is the expected next thing, which will be an average of everything that it’s learned. And so unless you can get very good at the prompting, and I’m dabbling around with that a bit myself at the moment, with building very specific custom GPTs and bots in Poe, to deliver very specific outcomes and undertake specific activities.

And a little bit like you’ve, voice of the customer, software bot that we’re, be interested to have a conversation with later. I think the, this whole, I don’t think necessarily that it’s a new industry called, bot prompting, engineer, a prompt engineer. I don’t think there’s any such thing.

if you really want to get serious about it, the AI can prompt itself. So I think that, that little wave of prompt engineers came and went very quickly.

01:00:00- Christine:

Even from a content perspective, I think a lot of people were freaking out about Do blogs still have a role? What is gonna happen to Google and SEO?

But ChatGPT is still pulling its results from Google and blog posts that people are writing and videos people are creating. that was like another panic wave that came off. Okay, is there a point in writing blogs anymore? But yes, there is. It’s just people are going to be consuming it on a different platform.

Chat GPT is gonna pull it.

Terry: 

And it’s interesting that more and more of those blogs that it’s consuming are being generated by ai, So I’m really fascinated to see how that goes. I think it will potentially get to a stage where it’ll be so obvious when somebody’s written something out of their brain well, And Google their own experiences.

Christine: 

Google is going to penalize blog posts that are a hundred percent AI written if they’re nonsensical.

01:01:00-

But we also have to remember that the algorithm prioritizes what can get the person the best answer to their question. So it’s at this point, it can’t be just left alone to do its own thing.

It needs to start with the human thought, or at least be supervised.

Yep.

So that the content is actually. Getting to the heart of what that person intended when they made the search, what was the search intent?

Terry:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Christine, look, you’ve worked through both enterprise SaaS and smaller service businesses.

What messaging principles apply across both?

Christine: 

I would say simplicity in message is going to be key to both. Like I said before, I think B2B and B2C are gonna, they’re gonna become more and more intertwined

01:02:00-

The way that marketing and the sales process works. And I think that at the end of the day, whether you’re selling to a business or to a consumer, they’re both driven by the same thing, which is emotion, right?

Speaking to pain points and problems, and desires of the person, even in a B2B selling process or marketing is always going to be relevant.

Terry: 

Okay. it’s interesting, I’ve always been of the opinion that even though we’re selling business to business, it still is actually human to human, like it’s person to person.

And so sure there might be a slightly different buying process to like a typical e-commerce brand. You click on a basket and check out a pair of shorts or t-shirt and you know it’s paid for and delivered in a couple of days. It might be a longer process because it’s the more complexity potentially in the sale in that, there’s other factors other.

People that need to be involved in the decision or

01:03:00-

They might need to assess the product in terms of if it really solving their part of the problem. Sometimes the problem is shared by more than one person for more than one,for across more than one reason. So I get it that it can be a little bit more complex that way, but I’ve always felt it’s, it is still person to person.

One of the early, when they first brought out this idea of the Challenger sale, I remember going through a fairly intensive training program and thinking to myself, look, I get the idea in terms of, trusted advisor, but I don’t think that’s new. I’d been in.

The field of sales and marketing, business management distribution for 10 years before that. And it was like this trusted advisor, and being able to actually bring new insights and challenge. It was how do you bring value to a client? You can show them a different way of thinking about things or bring them some information that they didn’t know about.

I know that’s just not, that’s what all the challenges sale is about. But for me, that was the core concept of it.

01:04:00-

it was interesting that I think the fundamental underlying psychology doesn’t change. We all make decisions based on emotions because we’re making them based on a self-centered perspective of what it means for us.

Then we’ll go forward and justify it with logic. Yep. And regardless of how much we’d like to say, no, this has been a logical decision. Here’s all the numbers. When it’s all said and done, we’ve made that decision before we’ve started to put a pen to paper on the numbers, quite frankly.

Christine: 

Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.

We justify with logic after the fact.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. For a founder or marketing lead listening today, what’s one high-leverage change that they can make to increase conversions fast?

Christine: 

I would go into the sales demos, whatever you have recorded, the chat bot, wherever that repository sits, and literally create a voice of the customer document.

01:05:00-

Understand how people are articulating their problems. What ways are they phrasing their problems? What words are they using? And start weaving that into your messaging, and you will see whether it’s an increased open rate in your email marketing campaigns or an increased conversion on your landing pages.

You will see that because. It’s just a matter of did that message hit or not? Did it drive them to the outcome or not? And when you can talk to people in the way that they actually speak about their problems, you will break through the noise. Because again, there’s a lot of generic messaging and a lot of We do this, we do that, choose us.

But when somebody hears their problem articulated in the way that they talk about it, it cuts through the noise. I know saying cuts through the noise is like very marketing jargon, but really like when we think of somebody who’s getting 200 notifications per day,

01:06:00- 

And what messages actually capture our attention and get us to click, when you can get close to that, you will see results immediately, even if it’s a little bit of an uptick

Terry:

Because they feel heard.

you get them, you understand what their problem. Yep. No, they, that they’ll always get ’em interested to continue the conversation. a quick question back on AI again. How are you using AI in your own business right now? Is there any sort of cool use cases that our audience might not have thought of or not be aware of?

Christine: 

Yeah, so I sell information products. that’s the other side of my business. So I use a lot of custom GPTs and because I use a chat bot and because I’m getting inbound leads on my website, I’m answering very similar questions. And what I’ll do is I have a customer service custom GPT, and basically I will feed the inbound inquiry into this custom GPT and it spits down an answer.

01:07:00-

It has to be supervised by me, but what. I think I would say the value proposition or why it’s worth it for me is that the GPT knows my positioning. It knows how I like to answer questions, it knows the ins and outs of my product, so that, that question, or sorry, when that answer is delivered, it not only takes the person into account and what they said, but it answers it from my vantage point, right?

Because that customization, that level of personalization is needed and that’s what the custom GPT can help me at least save time, drafting those messages. voice of customer, I’m not doing that with my own custom GPT I’m trialing. I can say their name. They’re called on target ai. they have a waiting list.

I’m one of their beta trial users. That has been a really

01:08:00-

Cool tool because if you have reviews on Google or Capterra or G two, it compiles all of that into something that’s actually very similar to the brand script that I create. So that’s a really cool tool. and then. In terms of just everyday life, I’m using ai.

even for my weight loss journey, I’m literally using it as a therapist. And that’s why I literally say it’s coming for every role because when I have a hunger craving and I wanna go and go off of my diet, instead of going to do that, I will go back and forth with the robot and it will remind me of my goals and do that cognitive behavioral therapy.

So I use it for so many things. the business is obviously just one part of my life.

Terry:

Interesting. That’s interesting. Since we’ve been able to talk to, chat, GPTI must admit, I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations myself on the weekend. Came up

01:09:00- 

with an entirely new product and new offer, on our check with Yes. Just to have that like ridiculous

Christine: 

Yeah. To have that sounding board, and like you as a human, being able to talk to it and have it repeat things back is really interesting. The one thing I wouldn’t recommend that everyone’s doing right now is having chat, GBT turn a photo of your pet into a human.

It’s like what your dog looks like as a human, and it’s very disturbing. So if anyone’s listening, don’t drive. I don’t wanna know what my adorable dog looks like as a grown man.

Terry: 

Exactly. Exactly. exactly. Oh my goodness. So you did say, don’t do that. It’s disturbing.

Christine: 

It’s very disturbing. it’ll tell you, okay, I’m gonna capture your animal’s essence and show you what it would look like as a human.

And it’s just, it’s really weird.

Terry:

That’s one of those terrible

01:10:00-

Curiosity things that I’m probably gonna have to do as soon as we finish this call.

Christine: 

Yeah. If you have a cat bug.

Terry: 

Oh my goodness. so I’ve got, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that I should have that you’d like to mention?

Christine: 

I feel like we covered a lot. We covered a lot. It’s just messaging, ai, and if anyone, I would say just as a call to action, if anyone feels like, Hey, I know what we do is really great and I have great results, but for some reason leads aren’t converting and we’re not articulating what we’re doing, I would say even if you don’t hire me, have an outside person come into your business and actually get to the root of what makes you unique, what makes you effective, and articulate it in a way that resonates with the target customer.

If you can find someone to bridge that

01:11:00- 

Gap, it can solve a lot of lead problems.

Terry: 

I can sit here and say from personal experience that is so difficult to do as a. Founder in a business, a co-founder, CEO, you’re sitting in here, it’s the old classic saying of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Yes. And yeah, I’ve been studying a bit of copywriting over the last 18 months and, wrote my first ad back in 1994. So I’ve had a bit of experience and, but I’m sitting here and in this conversation we’ve had, I realized that I’ve just gone too far down the quirky, intrigue side with the heading.

And it’s just completely at a position where now we need to go back and start from scratch again almost. And so I think that advice in terms of finding somebody external to have a look at it, can help just bring you back down. And I think, the other, the single message that’s been, running through here has been the, keeping it simple, the communication simple, making sure it’s very easy for people to understand what the message is.

01:12:00- 

so I’ve got, one last question. is there one belief or lesson that you wish every marketer understood about copy and conversations?

Christine:

I would just say, I guess the first thing that came to my mind was like, leave your assumptions at the door. Your biases, right? I think that’s the hardest part, about being in marketing is that we do tend to come to the table thinking, no, I know this is what they want. I know this is the message that will hit, and that’s where the data really comes in to show you like, no, that’s actually not what they want.

And it can be really hard, especially the closer you are or the more work you’ve put into a campaign and then you find out, oh, that’s not actually what it was. So I would say just hold onto your own ideas and assumptions loosely. Don’t get too attached because the simple message or. the message that you don’t think sounds right could be what resonates.

01:13:00- 

And you just have to be open to that possibility. That’s what I have found. And that is really hard to do when it’s your own baby, when it’s your own product. So I, that’s where that kind of having someone, whether it’s a marketer or whatever, come in and say, no, this is actually what’s gonna convert can be really helpful.

Terry: 

What are you talking about? Nobody knows my business. Like I know my business. Christine, please don’t be so offensive. I hear it a lot. I get it. I get it. I get it. Yeah. It’s been, it’s been a good conversation. Are you reading or have read any good books that you would recommend?

Christine:

Let’s see. I’ll tell you one book that’s in my shopping cart.

it’s The Dip by Seth Godin. I like his work on, marketing. He has a book called, this Is Marketing that I really liked, and his newest work is called The Dip. And it’s basically about like when to

01:14:00-

Give up because you failed versus when do you just have to get over this hump. So that’s on my reading list.

there is a book called Like the Wealthy Consultant. I forget the guy’s name, but he has a podcast and he’s really good. So I’ve been reading that. what else? Yeah, I try to do my reading more just on an entertainment and personal, things that I’m interested outside. I’ll tell you if you wanna not think about marketing and sales and business.

bill O’Reilly has what’s called the Killing Series. So it’s like killing Kennedy, killing the witches, killing Jesus. And he talks about these historical events, but he’s such a good writer that he’ll take like a dry historical event and make it sound like a thriller.

01:15:00-

So his storytelling ability is unmatched.

I would just recommend anybody read his books, killing Witch, killing the Witches about the Salem Witch trials. And killing Jesus are like my two top books of this year. So

Terry: 

Good. No, that’s a great recommendation. I’ll, I’ll check that one out myself for sure. yeah. Good read. Said God and he’s a favorite of mine of Purple Cow.

I haven’t read, the Dip actually. So I will jump into that and have a look at that.

Christine: 

And Reading a Story Brand by Donald Miller is always gonna be like, it tends to be that book that people say, oh, that’s on my bookshelf, but I haven’t read it. But once you do read it, it changes everything.

There’s also a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. He’s actually a big voice on LinkedIn. He has a lot of really great opinions, but my whole basis of content marketing came from that book. So in terms of what to create in terms of content from a marketing

01:16:00-

Perspective, that book is absolute gold.

It’s a classic.

Terry: 

That’s the they ask you answer book.

Christine: 

Yep.

Terry: 

Okay, look, I’ve gotta say the story brand book. I read that and it did change me and I got all inspired and started to work through the worksheet, the workbook and everything. And then life happens and I’ve literally been back to it probably five times and still haven’t been able to get it to a point where I can get to the end and then use that to formulate the content on the website.

it’s been quite frustrating actually, and it’s something that I started about three years ago. And the hard part I’m finding is that every time I go back to it, I almost have to go back to the beginning again to refresh myself of what we’ve been through all the way through. It’s something that you do really need to be pretty consistent on.

Look, and I’d say if there’s anyone out there listening that’s, considering going through this process, beware that is the challenge. you really wanna have someone like Christine come in that can go along and complete that journey for

01:17:00-

You in one go as opposed to, getting, stop and start.

Stop and start as I have for sure. So very good. thank you today, Christine. It’s been an excellent conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it and I think that,the.

The audience will have some really good takeaways, particularly around the requirements for simplicity. And the big one for me is just stepping out of the forest. being able to see the, forest for the trees. It’s the probably the single biggest message in here. I got wrapped up, guilty as charged.

I got so wrapped up in it myself. I’m sitting here going, oh my God, I’m actually embarrassed by our website at the moment. So don’t go look@chatmetrics.com for a moment. or maybe by the time this is published, it’ll be okay. Actually, I’m gonna have to make a commitment now. By the time this is published, my website will be okay.

Go and have a look at it. good. For sure. thanks Christine. Thanks for joining us today on the chat.

Christine: 

Thank you so much.

01:18:00