Growing Revenue by Focusing on Ideal-Fit Customers with John McTigue

John McTigue spent 14 years at Kuno Creative, 13 of them as an owner, before retiring and starting Riptide Press with longtime collaborator Ed Marsh. Andrew Dymski hosted this one, recorded as session six of Agency Journey Live. John has been in sales and marketing for more than 40 years, figures he might be the only officially retired inbound marketer in the world, and spent the whole conversation on one idea: build marketing around what customers actually want.

A retired inbound marketer’s list of what people hate

John came to inbound in his 50s, about ten years before this recording. Andrew asked what mistakes he was seeing, and John answered with a list he’d just published.

I think it was just last week I put together a list… for 2019, all the things that I hate. So TV ads, online ads, self-help offers, fitness tech, email, personalization, robocalls, retirement solutions, customer service and customer experience. That was my top 10… And the interesting thing is that every single one of those things is marketing.

(Listen at 03:50)

His point: inbound promised to stop bombarding people, then drifted back into a hybrid of inbound and outbound, which is where he thinks most agencies sit now. “Nobody wants this stuff. So why are we doing it? Why do we sell this to companies?”

The myth agencies tell themselves

Andrew asked what lie agencies buy when they keep running the same playbook.

I think they all rationalize it. In fact, I did too. That you’re helping a company grow. So that’s the myth, is that you’re helping them grow revenues by pushing ads, by emailing people, by just the whole lead management process… All of these are touch points that don’t really follow the journey that a customer wants. It’s your journey.

(Listen at 05:58)

He contrasted that with how he learned to sell before the internet: a live meeting every time, and a relationship that took a while to build and was the reason you won the deal. People talk about that now, he said, “and they dance around it, but they don’t really do it.”

Customer experience is the lever agencies aren’t touching

Andrew asked how an agency puts its ideal-fit client at the center of everything. John called it a culture shift and a heavy lift, but said you can start small with the client’s actual customer experience.

A lot more than automation, a lot more than marketing content, a lot more than advertising. It involves really getting into their heads and helping them understand what needs to happen to provide that better experience. And if they do that, you get quick wins out of it. You can reduce churn, you can increase retention, you can get people to upsell… You can get word of mouth out of that… So there’s a lot that can be driven through the customer experience that we’re not really even touching.

(Listen at 11:23)

Andrew asked whether that means aligning service to sales to marketing one layer at a time. John said to skip the sequence: “It’s better to just say the hell with the departments and merge them.”

Why owners avoid the deep work

Andrew asked what holds owners back from getting inside a client’s business instead of prescribing tactics from the outside.

I think most owners fall into the trap of wanting to make things more like a machine than anything else. They want it to be self-fulfilling, self-propelling. They want to have a process that they can repeat and they can bring people in and onboard them quickly. They want it profitable, they want it efficient… So these kinds of explorations, these kinds of expansive thinking with the client don’t really fit in with that.

(Listen at 16:45)

The fix starts inside the agency, he said: a culture that really empathizes with the customer and wants to help them become better companies, in place of the love-hate relationship many agencies have with the clients who pay them.

Niche by who you can relate to, then lead with what they love

On niching, John didn’t push an industry vertical.

I like the niche idea and I really think you need to look for the best possible fit for your team, your company. And so my first inclination would be go local. Really look around you and see what needs are in your local community and people you can go get in front of, because that kind of solves the customer problem.

(Listen at 21:28)

The niche, as he put it, is “not necessarily a technique or an industry, it’s more something you can relate to.” Finding it is a team exercise: name the top three types of people you’d like to work with, and don’t filter by profit margin. Then sell them something they can get their arms around.

If you have a really talented designer in your staff, lead with that. Design is so great, it’s so emotional. If you create something beautiful for them to look at that kind of sets off their brand and makes them more approachable, that’s the thing. It’s not 20x leads per month… They care about revenue, but… it’s delivering something that they can get their arms around, that they could get in love with.

(Listen at 27:13)

Near the end, John credited Kuno’s run to his partner Chris, who handled sales, HR and the budget for years and left John free to imagine what’s next. “You’ve got to have both.” He closed with an offer rather than a pitch: fill out the contact form at riptidepress.com and he’d mail you his book, free, in exchange for feedback. “I’m not looking to generate leads here. I’m just trying to meet new people and help whenever I can.”