Don’t Be a Walmart: A New Perspective on Pricing and Value for Small Business Owners

Don’t Be a Walmart: A New Perspective on Pricing and Value for Small Business Owners written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Do you want to be a Walmart? No, I’m not talking about turning your small venture into a multinational retail corporation overnight. I’m referring to the way you position your business in terms of pricing and the pitfalls that come with competing on price alone. While Walmart’s low-price leadership model works for them, it is – […] Maximizing Your Marketing Impact With Fractional CMOs written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with JP Maroney In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview JP Maroney. He is a seasoned business strategist and Fractional CMO with over three decades of entrepreneurial experience. He is known for his strategic prowess, serving powerhouse clients like Wells Fargo and Century21, as well as growing companies, often as a Fractional CMO, Chief Strategic Officer (CSO), or Chief Strategist to numerous ventures. Key Takeaway: A fractional CMO can be a cost-effective solution for businesses to access top-level marketing expertise without the burden of hiring a full-time executive. JP highlights the importance of framing services in terms of results and outcomes, focusing on the value delivered rather than just the hours worked. Additionally, it’s important to consider the power of strategic marketing alliances through this model and how this can have the potential to bring fresh ideas from other industries into a business to drive growth and success. Questions I ask JP Maroney: [01:37] How would you describe what is a Fractional CMO in your own words? [04:31] Is there a way to scale a business model like a Fractional CMO or is it just a way to be highly paid for your time? [07:44] Is there a certain type of market that you target to get clients, or is it really more that you organically attract the clients and decide if the Fractional CMO model works for them? [13:51] Have you seen any change in the market for businesses being more interested in strategy? [16:51] Do you prefer long-term engagements or short-term engagements, or is it really different for every client? [18:50] There are different types of Fractional CMOs; some provide implementation, and others are just third parties to delegate or help you build or manage a team. Do you have instances where you’ve maybe done all of those and what maybe are the pitfalls or upside to those different approaches? More About JP Maroney: Follow JP on social media: @jpmaroney JP’s website. Check out JP’s Youtube Channel. More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training: Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here Take The Marketing Assessment: Marketingassessment.co Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please! Duct Tape Transcript Email Download New Tab John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at DTM world slash certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. (00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jans. My guest today is JP Moroney. He’s a seasoned business strategist and fractional chief marketing officer, Fractional CMO, with over three decades of entrepreneurial experience. He’s known for his strategic prowess serving clients like Wells Fargo in 20 Century 21, as well as growing companies, often as a Fractional CMO or Chief Strategic Officer, or CSO I guess we’d call that to numerous ventures. So jp, welcome to the show. JP Maroney (01:30): Hey, thank you sir. Appreciate the invitation. John Jantsch (01:33): So I’ve been talking about this topic of a Fractional CMO frankly, for 10 years, but I’ve really leaned into it the last couple years because I think the market’s caught up. But I, I’d just love to hear from you, I’m gonna do a few shows on this topic. If somebody asked you what’s a Fractional CMO, how, how would you describe that in, in your words? JP Maroney (01:51): Well, I think that other business models or other business categories have paved the way with fractional ownership. So jet ownership fractional, all sorts of things, you know, so yachts and housing and everything else. So that kind of gives people the general idea, but it’s essentially, in fact, I put a header on my LinkedIn sometime back that said, rent My Marketing Mind . And I basically look at it like that. I’ve done a lot of consulting over the years, done a lot of business coaching over the years. I’ve built my own companies. But in this particular model, you’re giving someone a very quantified access to your time and expertise at a quantified rate. And they can correlate that in some ways to a budget. They can also look at how that relates to where they’re trying to take their company. Yeah. You know, fractional, one of the benefits, I’m sure we’ll get into this, but one of the benefits for business is for fractional professionals is that a company either may not have the budget or they may not have the demand Yeah. For a full-time person. And so when you bring a high level executive like yourself or myself on, if you try to do it for an employee, the load and the drag that’s on top of just the salary is so substantial. And this gives them a budget friendly way, sort of to get into that. John Jantsch (03:26): Yeah, I looked at recent survey on salary.com and a chief marketing officer somewhere in the range of two 50 to 360, um, thousand. So, so yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. In some cases it’s budget, so it’s a way to get, you know, some strategic thinking at a fraction, uh, of the cost. But I think the bigger point, like you said, is, you know, what’s a full-time CMO gonna do at an, at an organization that, you know, because they’re not writing ads, theoretically, they’re not, you know, they’re not designing campaigns or executing campaigns necessarily. So you have to have a pretty significant almost marketing department probably to afford a, a full-time CMO I would think JP Maroney (04:06): Either the Yeah, either have your own existing or that CMO needs to bring a team with them if they’re not gonna get in the trenches and do, and they shouldn’t, by the way, if you’re paying a guy, you know, like I based my CMO rates on a half a million, roughly a half a million dollars, so like 40 grand a month kind of thing. Yeah. And so a quarter share, say $10,000 a month or whatever, but, um, you don’t want a guy that you’re spending that kind of money on doing work that could be hired out for 20, 50, a hundred, even $150 an hour. John Jantsch (04:38): Yeah. So, so one of the things that, um, I think is a challenge for, I think a lot of people jump, you know, they’ve got CMO experience, they jump out, say, oh, I can be a Fractional CMO. Um, one of the challenges is how do you, how do you keep it from literally selling your time? Or maybe that’s it for you. I mean, if, is there a way to scale a business model like that? Or is it just a way to be high, highly paid for your time? JP Maroney (05:04): Yeah, it’s, it’s not my preferred. This kind of came about as demand people were asking about it. And I said, Hmm. And I, the, before I actually offered this, my oldest daughter who is in her early twenties, well now mid twenties I guess, she’d graduated from college and a business degree and was very marketing minded, had actually started her own social media marketing company before getting out of college. But I recommended that she do this and she offered herself as a fractional marketing director Right. For some companies. And I got, I got a chance to see it work, and I also got a chance to see some of the holes in it. ’cause there are some pitfalls with the model. But yeah, I, like you, I’ve coached and, and advised a lot of other consultants and coaches and stuff over the years, and I’ve always said to them, I, I never want the meter running. (05:56): Like, I don’t want to correlate my time to dollars per hour. And so there is a little bit of a trap of doing that with, with CMO work or fractional, uh, C X O. So any fractional executive, there’s a little bit of a trap of doing that. I always tell people, I say, look, you’re buying approximately a quarter or a half or whatever of my time, but we’re not gonna have a clock running. And that’s both in your favor and in my favor. There’re gonna be times when the demand might be higher and there’s no way that you could get me for a half a day for that amount of money a month. So you’re gonna win. And then there’s other times when maybe that week I have less hours in it mm-hmm. , but I always try to base, you know, I don’t think, you know, it goes back to the old thing. People buy results, not features or whatever benefits not features. You know, I, I don’t think that most founders are entrepreneurs who are mostly who hire people like us, U n I as CMOs, fractional CMOs. I don’t think most of them want to judge it by dollars. So you just have to frame and hours, you have to frame it correctly in the beginning. And if you do that, in most cases it works out. Okay. John Jantsch (07:19): Yeah. I, I tell you, the trap I’ve seen a lot of people fall into is it’s totally undefined. Yeah. You get a fourth of my time, but what does that mean, ? It’s like, I’m gonna be in every staff meeting. I’m gonna be on this, I’m gonna be in that. And I think that one