In this episode of the Book More Show, I sit down with Reuben Schwartz, a computer science expert turned sales and marketing consultant, as he shares his journey from working with Fortune 500 companies to building tools tailored for independent consultants.

Reuben opens up about his struggles with traditional sales and how they led him to design a CRM system that feels more like a relationship-building tool than a sales task. Through Reuben’s experience, we explore the value of genuine connections over typical sales tactics and how this shift can make sales feel less daunting and more authentic.

We dive into strategies for creating clear, targeted messaging that aligns with business goals. Reuben emphasizes the importance of defining your target audience to avoid the noise of vague communication, helping small business owners focus on meaningful conversations with the right clients. We also tackle the common “fear of missing out” that plagues many entrepreneurs, highlighting how a specific focus can enhance productivity and satisfaction.

From an introvert’s perspective, Reuben shares practical tips for networking and relationship-building, mainly how to transform significant, overwhelming events into opportunities for authentic connection. We also discuss maintaining relationships beyond events and leveraging tools to facilitate meaningful interactions without feeling overly mechanized.

Wrapping up, we explore balancing automation with personal touchpoints in lead generation and client communication, with Ruben’s advice on structured documentation and personal reflection as tools for deepening client relationships and refining your approach.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

1. In the episode, I discuss with Reuben Schwartz his transition from a computer science background to developing sales and marketing tools that focus on building genuine business relationships.

2. Reuben shares his personal journey of creating a CRM tailored for solo consultants, aimed at making sales and marketing feel less like a chore and more like an extension of relationship-building efforts.

3. We explore the contrast between automation-driven businesses and those that prioritize relationship-building, emphasizing the importance of clear messaging and defining a target audience.

4. The conversation highlights the significance of engaging with the right clients to foster meaningful business interactions and overcome the fear of missing out.

5. Reuben provides insights into networking from an introvert's perspective, suggesting ways to turn large gatherings into opportunities for authentic connections.

6. We discuss the importance of maintaining relationships beyond events, using tools to facilitate genuine interactions without feeling like part of an industrial sales process.

7. Reuben introduces the Memorand app, which aids in identifying and engaging with ideal clients, and simplifies the process of maintaining meaningful connections.

8. We address the challenge of balancing automation with personal touchpoints in lead generation strategies, emphasizing structured documentation and personal reflection.

9. The episode underscores the importance of personal connections over transactional interactions and offers strategies for effective client communication.

10. Finally, we explore the concept of conversational conversions, encouraging the use of tools to facilitate organic interactions and avoid the stress associated with traditional sales methods.

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Matt Ferri:
Website: Mimiran
LinkedIn: Reuben Swartz

TRANSCRIPT

(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)

Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Book More Show. It's Stuart Bell here and today joined by Rueben Schwartz. Rueben, how are you doing?

Reuben: Great to be here, Stuart. Thanks for having me.

Stuart: This is a pleasure. I'm excited by this. We caught up the other day on LinkedIn and the audience match between the people you talk to and the people who we talk to. It's such a great fit. So I'm really looking forward to sharing with everyone, listening what it is that you do and your approach, because I think it's going to resonate with everyone as they're listening. So why don't we start with a little background to kind of do the concise history of Rubin and where we get to today?

Reuben: Well, I'll try to keep it concise. I am a computer science guy. I accidentally started a sales and marketing consulting company, helping Fortune 500 companies with their sales and marketing, and I was one of those people who could help my clients pretty well but struggle with my own sales and marketing. Of course, there's a lot of people who do that. It's much more embarrassing when you're actually a sales and marketing consultant and I started building tools to make my life a little easier.

After I had tried so hard to just copy what my successful clients were doing and realizing that was just the wrong approach, I was like I have to do something that works more for me. I started building some proposal automation stuff. People asked if they could have it, so I took this thing and I made it an app. And then people started asking for more stuff and I kept trying to say no, but I kept realizing that for this tribe of independent consultants there's a lot of tools that nominally do what we want to do, but when you actually get into the nitty gritty they're built for somebody else. And so when people said, hey, I love your stuff, but I hate my CRM, because the idea was you could plug this stuff into your CRM.

They would say can you just make Mimarin be the CRM? And I said no, that would be nuts. The last thing the world needs is another CRM. The last person should build a CRM is me. I hate CRMs. Blah, blah, blah blah. So they said well, that's why you should do it. And eventually I was just getting frustrated, trying tool after tool, wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn't just master these things, and realizing in hindsight, of course, because they're built for a whole different situation. They're built for a VP of sales to keep track of a sales team. They're not built for a solo person who is trying to create and nurture relationships in his or her spare time, because they don't really want to be selling anyway.

Stuart: Right, it's such a great point, isn't it? I was on a call earlier today talking about we were actually talking about podcast platforms and recording software and there's a million of them around now, when there used to just be a couple of options or you had to roll it your own. And from that perspective, the point that I was making to those guys was each of the systems started off in a particular way and that kind of foundational bias or fundamental approach kind of comes through. So you've got one that's live streaming, but also have a recording. Another recording also has live streaming. One will be audio based, one will be video based, and they'll try and do more and more. But those foundations of where they're built kind of is in the dna of the product.

And, to your point, on the crms, as solo business owners, people who are looking after their own book, those who don't have big teams trying to make the most of a tool that's 80 too big and really just trying to maximize the 20% it gets lost in the noise Was that the experience that people were having that kind of convinced you to build it? It was more the tools weren't fit for purpose, or was it that the systems that you'd built and the engagement points kind of needed a home, if that makes sense. Which perspective kind of pushed you over the engagement points kind of needed a home, if that makes sense, which perspective kind of pushed you over the edge into building it as a tool?

Reuben: Well, it was sort of a combination of things and everything you mentioned combined with me finally being able to admit that if you're in a relationship business, you're in a conversation business and so you should be having conversations with people. And as an introvert who doesn't like selling, I had basically done everything I could to avoid this and realized eventually that was totally the wrong approach and the reason I found it so awkward was that I wasn't doing it right. And if I could do it right and if I had tools to help support me, I could actually have a fun time, like hopefully we're having right now having a conversation right. Like it's actually really fun for most of these people to have conversations, as long as they feel like they're not trying to stab someone in the eye with a business card at a networking event or trying to close some prospect who shouldn't really be closed. If they're just having conversations with people who are in their world, they generally have a good time.

So I was getting a lot better at doing this, but the CRMs that I was using weren't supporting me. I felt like I was fighting them to have conversations and I was talking to my customers and they were complaining about the same thing and they were saying, hey, can you make remember and do the CRM piece? And I thought, gosh, you know, all I really want is a way to have more conversations with the right people. Why is this so hard? I don't care about a lot of the other stuff I want, and that's what my tribe wanted too right, like, if you're in a relationship business, you want to figure out exactly who you want to talk to and you want to talk to them, and if you do those two things, life is good and gets better in a virtuous cycle. And what usually happens is one or both of those is a little off and it makes it hard and painful and you don't do it, and then you are in the vicious cycle and unfortunately, I know this from lots of personal experience.

Stuart: That's the trip up point I think for so many people is the other systems are based on 10 units of activity all down a pipeline but for most of us, in our situations where we're dealing more of a solopreneur, an independent person, not a team, those 10 units are really best spent at the conversation stage, not at the take it into fusion, soft at the other end of the spectrum or keepers is now you've all of this tagging and multi-variant options and split testing and all of that conversation is the 11th, 12th and 13th unit of energy that we just don't have the bandwidth for the conversation starting element. So the hag land that I have on linkedin is encouraging businesses to start the right conversations. Yours is encouraging conversations in the managed by the tool or facilitated by the tool. This conversational conversion point. Is that something that you find that most people resonate with but didn't necessarily have the language for, or they were trying to do things or weren't resistant to these things but didn't quite have the framework? How does conversational conversions land with clients?

Reuben: It's a great question, Of course, before we dive in. There are some businesses that are not conversation businesses, where you do want to have that big marketing automation set up and you press go and it goes. That's fine. If you're in one of those businesses, more power to you. I think where the trouble comes in and where I got myself into trouble was being in a relationship business, ie being ina conversation business but feeling awkward about it and so trying to pretend that I was in an automation business and then getting even more frustrated when it didn't work.

So I think the first step is understanding like are you in a relationship business? Do your clients come from referrals, do they come from conversations? Or can people come to your website and just buy something? And for my tribe you can't just click add to cart, check out and go. You need to talk to somebody and typically it's going to come in via referral. Even if it comes in via your website, it's probably because someone mentioned hey, go check out Stuart's website.

And so we need to have those conversations to build trust, and I think so many people out there are realizing that conversations are great. We all want to have good conversations where people are like oh gosh, stuart, when can I start working with you? Here's some money, please take it now. Or even just fun conversations, even if there isn't a monetary transaction involved. But we also have sort of that fear in our head about oh, these people are wasting our time, these people are awkward to talk to, oh, I don't really want to get back. I can't remember who I have to get back to. So there's a lot of mental baggage in there that gets in the way of just having conversations, and so my view is what can we do to strip away the baggage and get you focused. So, first of all, you're trying to have conversations with the right people and you're letting the universe know that if you're not part of this tribe, you probably should should walk on down the hall to the next specialist which saves everybody time and again.

Stuart: That's fine. It's good to know that earlier in the conversation than later in the conversation.

Reuben: Staves, everybody time, everybody frustration. I think that's where a lot of solo professionals get hung up. Yes, if they get that perfect referral, everything is great. But because their messaging is kind of vague and foggy, they end up talking to a lot of people that they really shouldn't be talking to, right? It's like if you have a shoulder problem, you shouldn't really be talking to the knee doctor, let alone the stomach doctor or the heart doctor. But if you just say doctor, you end up with all the wrong patients. And then it's like gosh, why aren't these people coming in for surgery? Well, because they're not in the right room.

And I think you know, you probably see this a bunch, with your people trying to get really clear, like, if you're going to write a book, we have to know exactly who it's for, because we're not trying to write the next James Bond mass market book, right, you're talking about a very focused business lead gen tool, so let's get really clear about who this is for, who it's going to benefit. And then the nice thing is, once you do that, the book or the lead magnet or the website or the tagline or whatever it is, flows out so much more easily because you can actually picture.

Stuart: Here's the person I'm talking to when I'm creating this content versus this vague, amorphous blob, yeah, yeah, and if it could be anything. It just makes everything so much more difficult because everything's a decision point which I guess carries on into the conversation, the longer term conversation. If you're clear on the direction from the beginning and the person is clear why they're there, it just makes the message so much easier, the conversation so much easier, as opposed to a game of guess who or telephone if you were constantly talking back and forth but not really quite on the same page or knowing why either of you are there. It's that clarity, the constraints of the scope just make everything so much more easy. And I think people have got this almost like a scarcity mindset. They don't want to risk excluding anyone, so they try and include everyone, which then means that the real people, the useful conversations, get lost in the noise of everything else that you're trying to do.

Reuben: I think that's such an important point. That whole scarcity mindset thing. Right, we're talking about small business owners, solo people who can't serve that many people at once. Anyway, right, like your addressable market is relatively small, you're not like Coca-Cola trying to get another billion people. Great at telling other people to do this, but of course, when it came to my business, I was a special snowflake and the rules didn't apply and blah blah, blah, blah.

And, at least for me, I realized I believe in all the math. Right, I get it, but when you try to use your cerebral cortex to solve a lizard brain problem, it just doesn't work, because the cortex is there to back up what we've already decided in our gut. It's not really there to like tell us what to do. And so for me, I had to use the gut to solve the gut problem and what I realized was I don't like sales and marketing. I'm not here to get a high degree of difficulty. This isn't the sales and marketing Olympics. I want it to be as easy as possible, and so easy versus hard, like that's a gut level, emotional feeling that we all get about sales and marketing, and most of us, given the choice, are like gosh, I'd really like it to be easy. How do I do that? Well, that's when you get laser focused and suddenly it's not scarcity anymore. It's about I don't have to do difficult sales and marketing. I'm just going to walk into good conversations and good things are going to happen.

Stuart: Right. It's that-based the scope that you've got for the activity that you can do. So the time that you've got the attention that you've got the focus that you've got For the consultants who are having those conversations and needing to follow up themselves, it's just picking their efforts and trying to make it the most useful it can possibly be and in the funnest way and the way that you're most likely to keep up with it. Talk a little bit about this, the journey that people go through, then, as they're. So, as we mentioned, memorands, the crm everyone I would imagine that most people listening have probably got a crm already, so they're kind of kind of familiar with the pain points or the frustrations that they've got with the current system. Talk through a little bit on someone's journey of moving from an existing system to this system and what is it that streamlines it and kind of their experience that's going to make them love being, or at least tolerant of being, in this world, rather than frustrated and annoyed by it.

Reuben: Well, first of all, I'm not out here to say that Mimarin is the panacea for everybody. If you love your existing CRM, great. It's like having a camera right. The best camera is the one you have with you to take the photo.

Stuart: If you love your CRM, knock yourself out If you're frustrated Particularly with the headache of switching. I mean that's not a zero cost either.

Reuben: Yeah, it's not, and I think. But if you've got a CRM, that's kind of collecting virtual dust, or you've got a spreadsheet, because the CRMs are just too complicated. The way I think of it is, memorand doesn't ask all that much of you as an app. I mean, every app has some learning curve but it's fairly simple. The things that it asks of you are the things that it's revealing. You have to know about your business anyway. So it's got a screen that helps you walk through.

Who's my ideal customer? What makes them an ideal customer? What do I do for them? How is that different than what they tried before and why doesn't that work? And it sort of lays out.

Doesn't have an outline for a book although maybe I should put that in there too but like here's what your elevator pitch is going to sound like, here's what your LinkedIn should look like, here's what a lead magnet should look like, et cetera, all based on that ideal client profile. And that can be hard for a lot of people because they actually don't know. So is it that Mimran is asking for something? No, the screen isn't hard, but if you've got to work on that, it's exposing that. Hey, you might want to spend some time working on that. The other thing that people often have trouble with is spend some time working on that. The other thing that people often have trouble with is okay, I have dozens of contacts over here. I have a couple hundred in my phone. I have these over here and how do I? They just get overwhelmed trying to think about who they actually want to talk to.

So you can do a few things, especially if you've got an existing CRM. You can dump the people out of it, usually in a CSV file, and you can slurp that CSV file into Memorand. You can also connect your calendar and it will go back three months and go forward a month and say all these people that I'm meeting with are probably people that I want to talk to. So let's bring that info into this CRM and then, as people book other meetings in your calendar, they'll appear there. So the idea is, at the very least, let's sort of have some notion of these are the people that we're talking to and let's keep talking to them, and we can add more over time. Right, we can use lead magnets to pull people in off the web. We're going to meet people, networking, you can track your referrals, et cetera. That's a reasonable place to start, and so many people are out there networking, meeting people, paying for LinkedIn, automation and this, that and the other thing and there's nothing wrong with any of those activities they're great.

But if you're in a relationship business and you're not following up, you're just putting more busyness into your life without being more effective. And so my notion is let's make sure that you keep talking to the people you really want to be talking to, and then you can add more people over time and you're also going to let go of some people, as you really clarify exactly who you want to talk to not just your ideal clients, but who makes a good partner for you and so on. Some people you're not going to end up talking to or you're not going to talk to as frequently. Some people you're going to want to talk to more. That can sort itself out over time, but the idea is get some people in there and then remember it makes it easy to block off time on your calendar to say I want my prospects, I want to talk to people I'm just overdue to talk to. You can have.

I've got weekly blocks in my calendar to encourage me to do this Right and then you can just go walk through who's in that queue when it's time, and so the idea is, let's take as much of the mental effort out of organizing this and just have the conversations. It's like one of the things I realized about college. That was nice. Is you just bump into people walking around? And in our suburban world we get in our cars, we work from home. You're lucky to bump into someone at the grocery store.

Stuart: Yeah, well, when you and I connected on LinkedIn, I mean the premise that I said to you was the reason I'd been reaching out to people and saying, hey, let's connect is because 10, 15 years ago now, when I lived in London, literally throw a stick out the window and hit someone who you want to go and grab a coffee with.

And it was so convenient because that centralization of people's paths crossing I'd heard people talking about the design of the Apple Park campus was specifically I mean there were problems with it but specifically built as a circle to facilitate more coincidental paths crossing of people. And that's kind of, I think, not interstitial, but the kind of limbic time in between, the process time, the coincidence element. It's such a missed opportunity and I think as we get more and more scheduled and more and more virtual, so those coincidental likely get fewer and fewer. It's really a big problem. So tools like this that can hopefully at least spark the reminder that good things happen when those things occur, is clearly a benefit and particularly, as you say, for conversation-based business, which most of us in any kind of anything where there's not water pouring out of the wall or something on fire or something at the checkout, you can just click by now. It's all conversations.

Reuben: Yeah, I think it is more and more important and I think an additional just to build on that, an additional point is if you're like me, you freaking hate networking events. Right, because there's just it's just overwhelming.

But what I realized is I really like connecting with people and so I would go to these giant industry conferences and this, that and the other and try to schmooze and get leads and all that, but I wouldn't follow up with the people I already knew because I didn't have a good way of doing that. So I would like get all the downsides of networking without the upsides. And so I'm not saying you shouldn't go to networking events by all means, especially if you like them.

Knock yourself out, but it's actually like when you actually talk to the people on an ongoing basis. First of all, next time you go to that event, you're not there as a stranger, you're there with a bunch of people and you're making introductions. They're making introductions. It's more fun. But then we also. We don't have to rely on a giant networking event to connect with our network. We have the power to do that ourselves at any level we want. And they always say you know, the best time to grow your network or plant a tree is 20 years ago and the second best time is today. So if you're not doing that, might as well get started. And I'll tell you as an introvert it has been just amazing, because I used to just dread I would force myself to have the conversations and I still have the muscle memory of the tension in my neck from like oh gosh, I'm a salesperson.

I hate this Now. I spend most of my day talking to people, and it's awesome because I'm having great conversations with the right people.

Stuart: We had a podcast with Tim Wacol a couple of months ago. So he's a sales trainer pretty established in large organizations and that was one of his points. Is the likelihood of intersecting with someone at the point that they're ready to buy? For most of us is unlikely because either the timing's just not right purely a timing point of view or the relationship capital isn't there or they don't see the value proposition. But reaching out to someone to wish them a happy birthday, to check back in with them, to just say hey, six months has passed. Just wanted to check back in to add value to the conversation in a completely open way, in a way that kind of is really trying to help them and give something, expecting nothing in return. That leads to all the relationships and the opportunities that that come from that.

But the challenge is the overhead and the, the mechanics of being able to remember to do that. We don't have unlimited bandwidth. So again, I think is another reason why maximizing tools to do the work that really makes a meaningful difference and not getting sucked into the tool in a way that it's burning and churning through leads or just focusing on collecting or too much of a focus on the sales rather than the conversation. Again, it's another benefit that just supports what we're trying to do, as opposed to us trying to do what the tools trying to force us to do.

In my mind as I'm talking, I've got the peter pan story of the if I'm remembering it right, many 40 years since I read it, but the where the lost boys are. They get into the underworld by going through trees and all of the boys are manipulated to the trees, rather than the trees are manipulated to the boys apart from the one, and that's how the pirate gets in. So, anyway, random way of saying that, this idea that we really want the tools to fit what we're trying to do and not us fit the tools, but there's only so many tools to choose from, so we do have to find ourselves getting drawn into a system that wouldn't necessarily be the one by choice, which again, is why I like this idea so much.

Reuben: I think that's a great point about the trees and sort of are we conforming to our tools or vice versa? Because that was the feeling I always got when I was working with these other serums Like I am working for this tool, it is not working for me. And it's obvious now because that tool was built for the VP of sales to run a pseudo-industrial production line of workers, ie the sales reps, pushing prospects through a funnel with a certain defect rate, right and as long as the defect rate isn't 100%.

There's some sales that drop out of it, that's what it's for, and when you're running a large sales org, as I knew from my consulting, you have to do some of that. You don't have relationships. You don't even have relationships with all the sales reps, let alone the prospects. But when it's your business and these relationships are your people, your partners are basically your virtual sales team. You have direct relationships with your clients. It's not like you hand them off to somebody else if they sign up. It's a very different relationship-based game and this industrialized version of I'm going to force someone through this process like an assembly line just feels terrible.

Stuart: Yeah, actually, that's a great point as well.

It's not even so much completely about the mechanisms of it or the structure of it, but the feeling that goes along with it.

You said it to begin with, but I didn't pick up on it at the time this idea of the tension in your shoulders and feeling stressed to execute on certain things and feel like you need to do it and not having the fun of the conversation, the thing that you actually enjoy doing.

And again, as a solo industry, as a as a small industry, where there's not a lot of relief from that, where you're having to do it all if all is, having to do things that are uncomfortable and even the most disciplined obbers are going to psychologically find ways to avoid it, and that results in not having the conversations that lead to adding value and doing something meaningful On that point of the conversation. So the tool is structured to help execute on those types of things. To surface the conversation opportunities how do you find people are with knowing what that conversation should be? So it's one thing to be reminded and have the opportunity to have a conversation, but knowing where the conversation goes and what the touch points are, do you find that is then a trip up for people that they're kind of on a Zoom call with someone and thinking now what?

Reuben: That could definitely happen, and I think we all have moments where we meant to check our notes and we didn't get a chance, or we have long COVID and we're just a little foggy. But for the most part, as you get more into it, you realize that a lot of it is just mental barriers in your own head, and so one thing I like to think of it is like the doctor's analogy. Someone comes back in to see you in three months. They may or may not need surgery, but you've got notes from their last visit. So what did you talk about? What were the next steps that you agreed to?

And there's even some stuff on that mission and positioning ideal client page in Memorand. That gives you ideas Like, if you're lost, here's some icebreakers to just talk about, but for the most part it's just build on what you've already talked about. These are people that you have some connection with. They're a referral, they're a past client, they're a partner. There's somebody that you know, or even if there's someone who came in via lead magnet on your website, you know they care about the subject of the lead magnet, which is something that you're an expert in, so you can just have a conversation about that.

So you're never starting cold and in my view I'm not saying there's anything wrong with cold calling and cold selling and all that, but it's definitely not for me. So there's no need to ever go into sales mode. You can just be in human to human, relational mode and the right people at the right time especially if you do a good job of defining that target market maybe having the book on the subject, that might help as well right, the right people are going to raise their hand and say, hey, how do I work with you?

Stuart: Yeah, those are two great points. I think the element of the setup of the tool, helping you to understand who is your ideal target, what are their motivators, who is the event you're talking to just again goes into such clarifying elements of. I could jump on a call with this person, knowing that they're this avatar for want of a better term and be able to talk to them about something on the subject. So that is freeing. And the other thing, I guess, goes back to the conversation that we just had on the stress of feeling like you have to make sales calls, like reluctantly turning up to that call at the last minute and feeling stressed going into it is very different and mentally blocking from. Oh hey, I get to speak to reuben again and quickly check what we talked about last time and enthusiastically thinking about the conversation and the then the jumping off point that's only having so much energy in our heads every week to do the stuff.

Reuben: If this particular activity now only takes three units of energy rather than 30 units, I mean it really is a game changer when I think there's something I want to add to that, because I think you touched on something really important that I didn't elaborate on as well as I should, and that is the difference between when you're not in this conversational mode and you get that one referral, who may or may not be a great fit. You haven't been calling people, so your pipeline is feeling pretty dry, but you've got this one person that you've got to make yourself call and you've got to try to make this work, even if it's not a great fit, because that's the one referral you got recently, versus you're in conversation mode.

You're getting, you have a room full of patients if you will, and if this person isn't the right fit, you send them down the hall to the other doctor, knowing you have this queue of other people that you need to go talk to. And that, I think, is the biggest confidence booster. Knowing that, hey, it's not this one shot, do what's right for everybody. And there there's more people behind this person. So there's no stress on any individual call, even if that person who you thought was the perfect fit says hey, I'm going to have to reschedule my surgery because of blah blah, blah, blah, blah.

Stuart: No problem, no stress.

Reuben: We'll talk again in six months.

Stuart: Yeah, and I mean we've all done it. I'm sure we've all done it I thought it's just me, but we've taken on clients that maybe we got the feeling that it's not the best fit anyway. But we're trying to kind of push the edge of the scope and I'm sure it'll be fine. And most of the time it's not fine because we're not able to deliver. Everything that we do isn't set up to deliver the best outcome for them, so no one's happy trying to just force it through.

When we think about the book journey, so most of the people that we're talking to are thinking about books as a lead generation tool in one way or another. They're not necessarily thinking about it in a very structured way, but they've got some information that they're passionate and want to share and they've got a feeling from kind of a rough feeling to a specific feeling that this will help start more of those conversations. So a lot of what we're trying to do is get people to think about orchestrating the conversation in the nicest sense. Think about what the next step is for the user, for the client, so that you can make it easy for them, a to say yes to, but, b also to get the most value out of it and not make it complicated. When we think about the automated end of that spectrum, like the very big business, chuck a load of marbles in at the top and then enough of them will come out of the bottom to make it worthwhile.

What do you say to people, or what's the advice where they're thinking about where that level is? Some people, I mean we hear it a number of times. Well, I'm worried about doing that because? So let me give a specific example we quite often suggest sending out emails from you as an individual, not from a general mailbox, and rather than pointing people to a web page where they can click to execute something, suggesting they just reply to the email, so as if it was me, as if I was emailing you, I'd maybe say oh, hit me, reply if you want some more information.

A lot of people are concerned by that because they've got this feeling that they're going to get overwhelmed with responses, and that's not the case for most people. So this idea of where's the human limit, the real what would be one-on-one we're just doing it at scale versus the automation do you have people who are concerned about that? They really want to automate everything out of the conversation and still think about conversational conversions. Really want to automate everything out of the conversation and still think about conversational conversions, but want to automate it as opposed to actually being the human in the mix.

Reuben: Oh, absolutely, and I've been guilty of this myself. And it's so funny because most of us are sitting in this situation where we don't have enough leads and we're like I really want this really effective lead gen strategy, but, gosh, I'm terrified that it might actually work really well. Really effective lead gen strategy, but gosh, I'm terrified that it might actually work really well. And what I tell people?

is if it works well and you get inundated, no problem, it's supposed to be Right, like that's the easiest, best problem in the world, right? You can hire a VA to respond and say I'm sorry, stuart's been really slammed with the response. We've been overwhelmed. It's great, we'll get back to you next week or whatever it is. That is the best case scenario, and I think people get way too worried about the best case scenario and then they complain that they're in the worst case scenario of not having enough leads because they're not doing the things.

Now, one thing I would say is this especially if you're going to the trouble to write a book, one of the great things that you can do is take different pieces of that content and use it for lead gen and follow-up, because you've already got the whole book. So you know, usually I say have a lead magnet on your site which helps your ideal client, start solving the problem that you help them solve. Right, and the idea is they can take that, start working on it. Most of them are probably going to get stuck somewhere along the way and then they're going to want to talk to you, right, and then you having a follow-up conversation with them is really helpful for both people.

When you have a whole book's worth of content, you may even want to have some different layers right, where one layer is sort of like the basics If you're just getting started here you go. And then layer two is more in-depth and more focused on potentially setting up a meeting with you for people who are not just exploring, they're ready to take action. And if you've got the book, you've got the content to do those two layers. That way you can say, hey, the people who are just getting started in this space that maybe you don't wanna waste your time with, they can go. Get the first level lead magnet that doesn't give access to your calendar. The people who are really ready to go, they can get the lead magnet which is then going to let them book on your calendar. And what I would say is at the beginning assume you're not going to have this problem. You can always implement this if you do get overwhelmed.

Stuart: Yeah, it's not a build it once it has to be set in stone forever. You can add to it or take things away at the drop of a hat. This is a digital world we live in. It's not like we're building buildings and then we're stuck with it for 30 years. The point that you were talking about in terms of orchestrating the journey and knowing where people are, as they're kind of investigating or looking for answers, again ties in so well to the approach that you have in the tool of step one is understanding who the target audience is and what their motivators are. Exactly the same for the books.

As a project, just build something, just write something isn't going to be as effective as write. The specific thing that you know then feeds that funnel of information, that value chain of information for months and years to come, because that is the conversation that they're interested in. It's such a I can't remember who it was exactly, but did a podcast with someone a couple of months ago and they were saying something similar. They were saying the exercise of going through they've had their program, their way of doing it for 10, 15 years but the actual exercise of sitting down and documenting it or starting to outline it in a specific way. It just forced them to go through that exercise and they came up with two or three things ways of wording things or how the program stitched together that they'd never particularly thought about or articulated before, because they've been doing the work very successfully for years and years.

But just this exercise of having to sit down and I imagine it's the same for people who are onboarding into the tool we know who the our audience is, we know who we can help best, but unless someone actually asks us and we're forced to kind of articulate it and even more so, writing it down, I mean that whole kind of psychology about actually writing it, even more so that it just illuminates for want of better terms the thinking that we've got around it and helps us focus our brain absolutely I've never really thought about it before in this particular way, but almost the exercise of having to write it down it's what's the name of this system copywork, the copy work, copywork, I think where you get the copy written by marketers that you really like and then write it out by hand 10 times and that exercise of reissuing the pattern kind of really puts it into our subconscious.

So again, there's probably an element of that, both in the Mimera and Avatar ideal client world and the book outline of actually having to write it down really reinforces it.

Reuben: I think that's really true, and I think people can get stuck and say that would be great, but I'm not ready for that, and so what I tell people do is go talk to your favorite clients and have them walk through the story with you. There's a little like case study customer journey page that you can use and they will give you the words right that you can't think of in your own head, no matter how clever you are, because it's just like you're inside the fishbowl, but your customers will tell you and be like, oh, that's what I've been trying to say this whole time. And then that, of course, is really helpful when you go. Try to turn that into a book, because you're not just dumping something out of your head, you're having something that is known to resonate with your favorite clients.

Stuart: Some of the ways that we have to kind of extract those ideas in the first place are interviewing favorite clients, the customer support team, if you've got other people who are dealing with those first line people.

The Google search on complete the sentence what people are looking for.

Because I think the real problem that we have, or the real challenge that we have as ourselves as owner operators or the people who deal with the execution at a slightly higher level, is clients, for the most part, are joining us at that lower level of understanding and we're always operating at the higher level because the lower level stuff takes care of itself.

Either it's slightly more second nature or automated, or we've got other people doing those pieces and we're only brought into the mix and the more complicated problem end of it. And that's not where they are so understanding that whether it's in the pages of a book or whether it's in a conversation you're having with someone to check back in, it's it can almost feel like dumbing down or being too basic. But getting that mentality away and it's not that at all, it's just meeting people where they are. I mean that's a game changer as far as conversation goes and it goes back to the more ideas are popping in. It goes back to the kind of like ai model of writing and one of the prompting tips there is write this at an eighth grade level, because if you don't put that constraint, something comes back far too complicated, but if you do, it reads like a normal person would speak if we were just chatting over coffee at Starbucks as opposed to being overly academic or technical Again, because that level's just at the wrong level.

Reuben: Well, it's funny you say that I was just talking to Lydia Lee on my podcast and she was talking about how, when you're in first grade, you probably don't want the professor, you want the second grader to tell you how to do something, and I thought that was such a great analogy.

Stuart: Yeah, yeah, it is so easy because we get so biased by our own. I mean, it is biased, but it's not in the negative sense of the word, but that language that is constantly going through our head. It's the word, the voice that's with us 24 hours a day. If that's at the professor level, just because that's where we operate, it is difficult to switch into a conversation that's at a level that's more appropriate for the audience that we're talking to. I want to make sure that time always goes fast on the podcast, but I want to make sure that people can find out more about you, what you do, so I'll link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes and on the webpage where the podcast is. You mentioned your own podcast there and then obviously the website. So what's a good place for people to go to find out a little bit more and carry on the conversation with you?

Reuben: LinkedIn's always great, so appreciate you putting that in the show notes. And then, of course, the website is Mimarincom. People want to do a free trial of the CRM. They can do that there, and there's also a bunch of free resources, proposal templates, even a little tool to help them with their positioning that maybe could feed into their book and a bunch of other resources as well.

Stuart: Perfect. Well, this, hopefully, is going to be the first of many conversations. We have, as I said at the beginning, this idea of keeping the conversation going. It's something that I'm passionate about, and I struggle with the same problems that you described everyone else has, so I'm excited to keep the conversation going with you and then share more of our conversation with the audience. So thanks for your time, Rueben, really appreciate it.

Reuben: Oh, thanks for having me. Stuart, Appreciate you.

Stuart: Fantastic. So, everyone, thanks for listening. As always, check out the show notes. I'll put links straight through to Rueben's LinkedIn profile and then the website. I'll put links straight through to Rueben's LinkedIn profile and then website, and then drop us a note in the comments, either on the podcast or hit reply to the email. And these conversation challenges definitely something that we're looking to help people fix. So drop us an email with whatever challenges that you've got and then I'll be a conversation point for a future show. Alrighty, thanks for listening everyone, and we'll catch you in the next one.