Introduction 

You need to make a decision but don’t want to make a mistake. For decades, Dr. Constance Dierickx has helped leaders make wise decisions. Now, she’s sharing how to see what others don’t and make great decisions when it matters most. So come on in and have a seat. It’s time for your appointment with The Decision Doctor.

Constance Dierickx

So, Peter Sandeen, hi. I’m so excited to be able to have this conversation with you. How are you?

Peter Sandeen  

I’m doing good. Still, my voice is a little down after being sick, but I’m feeling good.

Constance Dierickx 

Well, you look like yourself. So I hope the energy level is up there. I know your brain is working because your brain is always working so well. And just for the listener, I want to frame my first question for the listener that you are a marketing expert. You and I met because you’re a marketing expert, and I attended a webinar that you did. I just found what you had to say so refreshing, so clear, and some of it quite counterintuitive. So I wanted to invite you on to have a discussion with me because decisions around marketing and marketing quotes spend, how people spend their literal money, their capital, but also their human capital is not only extraordinary, but it has important consequences. So marketing expert, how did you get into what you do now?

Peter Sandeen

Very simply, I started two different businesses around two different crafts and got very bored with both as soon as I figured out how to get good clients consistently. And at that point, my wife was like, “Have you considered doing marketing? Because that’s the only thing you talk about anyway.” So I was like, “Well, okay, I’ll listen to you.” Around the same time, I heard of the concept of direct mail advertising, which here in Finland exists, but it’s not nothing like the one you have in the US. I just heard of this concept of sent someone a letter, sell them something, and they send you a check for hundreds or thousands of dollars. And it sounded like a magic trick. And I don’t do well when I see a magic trick I don’t figure out. I just, I need to figure it out. So I decided to figure out how that works and jumped into copywriting initially. First, I wrote competing sales pitches for marketing people who already had good sales pitches. They would AB test mine versus theirs. And if and when mine beat theirs, I got paid. I never lost. There was one tie, but I never lost. So somehow, for some reason, I was somehow naturally good at it. I mean, I didn’t practice a ton, but it was somehow natural for me to see what to focus on. And from there, I moved to conversion optimization. So I wanted to see what else affects sales consistently, not just the copy. Pretty soon, while doing that, it became clear that there’s not that many things that consistently make a difference. There’s lots of things, or almost anything, sometimes, that make a big difference. So if you look up results on tests, you’ll find all sorts of how this button color change — yes, but that’s like, you very rarely hear about the tests, the hundreds of similar tests that didn’t do anything. So that’s how I ended up focusing on what I focus on now, which is really the basics that drive the results and the consistency in results.

Constance Dierickx 

So you made that decision to pivot professionally based on the advice you got from your wife. Was what percentage of your decision was based on her commentary to you?

Peter Sandeen 

I would say that it would never have occurred to me, most likely, it would never have occurred to me. This is probably the least predictable profession for me. Like if you would have told me when I was 15 that I’m going to do marketing, it would have been the most absurd idea. Right up there with like, very absurd ideas. So I don’t think I would have seen it. But then again, once she pointed it out, it was like, yeah, this kind of makes sense. I was willing to see it fairly quickly. But I don’t think I would have seen it without her pointing it out.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, that really illuminates a tendency that I see in people that are really successful. As you know, I work with a lot of leaders, and there’s an ability to withhold judgment, to the extent that you feel then obligated to defend your judgment and your decision. So I like to, when I’m looking at leaders and talking to them, I like to think, “Did they just make a decision or did they just have a reaction?” So I can think of a lot of couples where the wife says to the husband, “Oh, have you thought about…?” And the husband goes, “Eh, what do you know?” But I know you well enough to know that you are able to slow down your own reaction long enough to think, which I think is a really useful and important quality, especially in marketing where people can get so excited and caught up in the bright shiny object syndrome. “Oh, it’s the new thing.” I want to talk to you a little bit about that as we go forward. But one thing you mentioned just now that I want you to elaborate on is the importance of copy and messaging is undeniable. If your message is muddled, your audience is confused, and they don’t contact you, they don’t buy, they don’t engage with you. But there’s a missing piece, which is the follow up and rationally studying the effect of, “We changed the button from blue to gold, and whoo, the money poured in. And oh, but we forgot to mention that it trickled off. We forgot to look at the mistakes we made.” So will you talk a little bit about follow up and the importance of objectively and thoroughly gathering data?

Peter Sandeen 

Well, first of all, I think there’s lots of people who gather way too little data. But there’s also people who gather way too much data. There are very few people who make very effective use of data in marketing. They exist, but it’s not a very common thing, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is that most of the data that you naturally get from Google Analytics or your CRM or whatever else, it’s not the most actionable. It’s very rarely, sort of, by default, something that is easy to act on in a good way. Yes, it might tell you that we’re not getting enough leads. But we would have probably heard that from the sales team without the data. So, it very rarely, just naturally, is actually helpful. Whereas you need to do something about it, you need to massage it to a point where it’s actually telling you that, “Hey, you need to focus on this thing down the line, or this is in the funnel, the issue,” or whatever you call it, pipeline, I don’t care, but like, it should be pinpointing the issues and the opportunities. For example, in a typical email campaign, people are, for example, looking at click rates, because that’s what CRMs and email marketing software typically give you. This is the click rate. I’ve, for years, wondered why it is based on what percentage of all the people you sent an email to click it, because you can’t really do a lot with that data. Whereas if you know what percentage of people who open the email are clicking it, then you can tell, okay, so does the email itself work? Does those who open it actually get to the point where they want to click? So it’s sort of a side note, but it’s an example of a very simple way of like, the data that you naturally get is often fairly difficult to act on in a way that consistently improves results. So yes, you need data. But the default data is usually not very practical. Also, whenever it’s a snapshot, it’s questionable if it’s really helpful. So instead of looking at snapshots of like, well, what is it today, we should look at trends. And even with pretty big companies, there’s lots of people very nervous about the sales this morning or this week, whereas last week or the next previous day was brilliant. So looking at these individual moments in time, that can be very misleading. So there’s always a certain amount of variance and you need to get used to it. So whenever you’re looking at data, almost always, it makes sense to look at running averages. And really just, you need to do something with the data before you can really interpret it, is my point. But, raw data is rarely very helpful. But without it, you’re probably not going to make the best decisions either.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, it’s so interesting to me, you mentioned large companies. I’ve worked a lot of large companies, and I am perpetually stunned by a couple things. One is the tendency to measure inputs rather than outcomes. So it’s sort of related to what you’re saying about the data telling you what to do? So I guess an example is you publish something on LinkedIn and you get 57,000 likes. What does that do for you? If you’re a consultant like me, does your phone ring with the sort of person that you ideally want to work with? We get really stuck in this. The other thing that I’m perpetually mystified by is boards of directors who allow the management team to tell them what the metrics will be. So dear board of directors, this is how you should evaluate the efficacy of the management team. Now, some things are obvious: share prices, obviously. Like you said, some data you have anyway. But can you talk a little bit about, what do you see people doing that leads them astray, so that they make a big investment in measures that just don’t matter that much?

Peter Sandeen 

I think the most common ones are marketing companies selling help with an individual aspect of marketing. So whether it is advertising or SEO, or something else, any website, which I help people, sometimes, with websites, too, there’s nothing wrong with doing those things. But the way that the results are usually reported are typically misleading because the advertising company wants you to spend that money on ads. If it’s not getting good results in terms of profit, then it’s going to shift, typically, the focus on measures like sales. If the sales aren’t good, then we go back to how many clicks we’re getting. If that’s not good, then, look, 50,000 people have seen your ads, think about the branding value. And it’s like, it’s easy to get misled, intentionally or not, by all the numbers that you’re getting. Whereas the problem is that you should understand the important numbers before you start. So if you’re doing advertising, what is the goal? You’re happy with just exposure with no sales in sight, then, okay, let’s buy a billboard, just put an ad there, lots of people will see it, very few are going to buy anything. But hey, we’re just looking for eyeballs. I think that sort of thinking is very common. People who are not sort of rigorous enough about how they evaluate marketing results or business results overall, they look at things like well, we’re investing in these future things that may or may not materialize. And again, nothing wrong with doing that. But you need to be careful with how you value it. If there’s never anything more than just investments into a potential future, then well, as long as it’s only in the future, then it’s not really a business. It’s a research department. So being just more mindful of what are you really trying to achieve with the different things you’re doing, whether it’s marketing or something else? Even if you’re hiring new salespeople, are you doing it to improve overall conversion rates? Are you doing it to increase upselling? Are you increasing it to be able to go after new clients? Like why are you doing it, is, I think, something you should define before you do it, rather than sort of give yourself the leeway of finding excuses later on, or explanations or favorable statistics after the fact, because you can always find those. If you’re good at what you do, you can always find some.

Constance Dierickx

In my business, we call that rationalizing. You probably do the same. But I know that in a lot of professions, not just marketing, a lot of professions, we learn a lot, and we adopt a set of beliefs that are hard to question later. And I know that one of the values you bring and one of the values I hope I bring is I ask questions early that get people to think differently. So how do you help people think about the right things? What are the questions? You and I just met, say, and I’m the CMO for some $20 billion company, and I think I know what we’re doing. I’m pretty sure I know what we’re doing. And maybe I do. But what are the questions you would ask to either confirm that we’re on the right path, or help me see that if I make some changes, there could be improvement?

Peter Sandeen 

Honestly, usually people come to me when they have a question. So either they are worried about something, or they know that something already went wrong. That’s usually the case that makes people be like, “Oh, we need help.” If everything seems to be going well, I’m not the one they call. They usually then invest in more advertising or more something. They buy more specialists to do more, which, again, if everything truly is working well and the profits are great, then that might be fine. But usually they come to me with a problem. And then it’s easier, but let’s say they don’t have a very specific feeling. I would usually start just questioning why the decisions are made the way that they were made. So why is the focus what it is? How are the different aspects of marketing tied together because you can make marketing profitable even if the different aspects aren’t really tied together, but you’re losing out on 90% of what you can get. If you’re really thinking of the bigger picture as one big puzzle, it gets really complicated really fast. And that’s obviously what we work through. But basically, getting clarity on what is all of the marketing supposed to do together? How do the different pieces work together? And how are you measuring things? So, especially in a company that size, typically, not always, but typically, they’re doing so much marketing that they sort of lose sight on where the results are really coming from, and what is potentially expensive or time consuming, but isn’t really profitable, or just very complicated. Because complicated has high opportunity cost. Because the more complicated something is, the more time it takes, the easier it is to lose sight of how it works, and so on and so on. So just evaluating, well, what is actually working, because typically, half the things are more or less useless. They might be profitable, sort of, but not really compared to the other half, that’s really carrying all the weight. So just getting more clarity to that usually helps. If they have a problem, being really specific about what the problem is. And when it’s super specific, then it’s much easier to see what’s causing it, what’s the underlying issues so that it doesn’t happen again. And then you can start looking at solutions. So how do we solve it in these circumstances? So not just, well, we now know what the underlying issue, here’s a solution that everyone claims is good. Like, no, you need to first figure out well, why is it a problem for you? What are your strengths that we can use to solve it? Then, basically, just calm down with the decision making process in a way. So instead of jumping to a seemingly good solution, really take the time to think of what are the options and then pick based on that.

Constance Dierickx

What you’re describing is the reason why I wanted to talk to you. So many people that I meet, or people that email me multiple times every day, I get these emails, like, “You need a bigger list,” or I mean, they don’t know anything about my business. They don’t understand that I don’t need a big list, I need the right list. Right? I need the right network. But the way you work is really, I’m gonna refer to this, Meta-Leadership, that it’s meta, it’s strategic. So you’re not looking at pieces, you’re looking at things as an interrelated whole, so that you can help, let’s say, let’s go back to I’m the CMO of ABC Company worth billions of dollars, help me understand that it’s not social media, it’s not SEO, it’s not copy, it’s not advertising. It’s this network of things that is going to influence the result. Is that right? Does that accurately describe the way your approach? I mean, those are my words, not yours.

Peter Sandeen 

Yeah. So like today, I talked with a client that runs a very technical software company selling to very large companies. And they were thinking of a different pricing model, because the board of directors had urged them to change it. And they said what they were told to make it, and I was just saying that, like, we can’t do that, that would cut off an entire section of the competitive edge that we have. It would no longer be there if we changed the pricing model to that. And the CEO looked at me in silence for a moment and was like, “Okay, yeah, what do we do?” So it was very competent, very smart people who had been in the business for a long time were all thinking that this different pricing model would make sense, but no one had just thought of, well, how would it reflect on the marketing messaging? Could we any more make the claims that are now making us the best option? So for me, that’s an everyday sort of thing that, well, if you change the pricing model, it’s going to affect the target audience, how they see things, what you can say in marketing, how it’s going to be viewed, what type of marketing you do, how are you going to do the selling, what sort of brochures, what sort of pricing page you’re gonna have. Everything is more or less connected, especially with things like pricing, because it, well, it affects everything. But yeah, you were right, as well. So if you do social media and you have an email list, those are not two separate things. Those are part of one strategy, at least hopefully, they are part of your marketing strategy where the pieces fit together rather than, well, we have a social media company and we write some emails. It’s like, they’re supposed to work together. Otherwise, they’re inefficient. Again, they may be profitable on their own if they’re done very well, but they’re going to be way more profitable if they’re done well together.

Constance Dierickx

What percentage of the time, when people come to you, are their marketing efforts disjointed, as opposed to integrated?

Peter Sandeen 

98.

Constance Dierickx

98 percent?

Peter Sandeen 

As a reminder, a majority of my clients are marketing companies. So it’s not like they wouldn’t have the expertise, right? It’s like, you can be very, very good at marketing, understand it extremely well, and do 90% of it really well. But when you have the blind spots that we all do when it comes to our own business, or anything, you’re that close to — if anyone doubts this, just ask your spouse, they’re gonna tell you, you have blind spots. Yeah, basically, everyone has that. It is very, very, very unusual that any company, no matter how well they do marketing, there’s almost always pretty meaningful, disjointed things they’re doing. The only exceptions, honestly, are those that aren’t doing very little marketing at all. Then, there’s just nothing to be disjointed.

Constance Dierickx

Ah. Ah. Well, you just made my head explode with examples of what you were saying. First of all, ask your spouse. Many years ago, I used to evaluate executives for hire into executive positions. So CEO or EVP of something or, you know, C-suite. And if I would do an evaluation and give the person feedback, and they argued with me, I would say, “Take this report home and have your spouse read it, and then call me.” And every single time, this was what they said. They would call me and they’d say, “My wife, or my husband, just looked at me in amazement and said, I’ve been telling you that for 10 years, or I’ve been telling you that for 20 years.” Now, I wasn’t trying to pull a magic trick, I was just trying to genuinely understand and appreciate an individual, their strengths, and what they could improve in order to get what they want, not what I wanted for them, but with what they wanted. It’s a very similar process to what you’re talking about. And the value of having an external expert, who’s not selling a thing, you’re not trying to sell pins or social media posts or things like that, you are looking at it in a very holistic way, which fits so well with how I like to think about things. Can you give us an example? I’d love to hear an example of a client, I know you’re not going to name them, and that’s fine, where they came to you, and they were doing pretty well, and you helped them do even better. A little bit about what you did and if you don’t mind, I might interject along the way.

Peter Sandeen  

Well, I think one one pretty simple example is actually someone we both know, a very well known marketing company that has hired me multiple times. They do very, very well. Also, very profitable, and, yeah, they’re marketing people. They’re very good at marketing. They do marketing, generally, very well. So I don’t think they’ve ever hired me. Like, once, years ago, they hired me to fix a problem. But ever since then, it’s always like, “Well, how do we get to the next level? Here’s a plan, what can we do better?” Usually, the response is, once we’re done with something, like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of knew that,” or, “We kind of knew that. But yeah, it’s clean. It’s like clear now. We know what to focus on,” or, “This has confirmed that, yes, we were aware of those risks, and we didn’t know this one. But now we have clear ideas of how to deal with them.” So honestly, especially with clients that are doing well, the clarity is the biggest thing, like getting clear on what are the issues they might be running into, and what are the potential solutions. And just the fact that we go through it is usually enough to make them actually take those steps because it’s very easy. Even if, again, you’re very good at doing your job, it’s easy to sort of feel like, well, that probably doesn’t happen. I don’t need to worry about that. And you usually get away with it. It’s just the one in 20 times when it hits the fan. So, really just going through what are the options and improving from there. If you’re already doing really well, it’s almost impossible to create some sort of explosive increase in sales. That’s not how it usually works. It’s just getting more consistent, better results, usually, really slowly. Of course, if you can expand to a new market, there’s those options. But if you’re doing the same thing for the same market, you’re not gonna see sudden increase of tenfold sales, if you already have 30% market cap. 

Constance Dierickx

I think this highlights a really important point, and that is that it seems to be much more common for people to call you or to call me when it’s very clear to them that something is wrong. It reminds me that, years ago, when I was a therapist and I was doing my residency, one of my professors said to me, “Do you know why marriage counseling fails so often?” And of course, I didn’t know until she told me and I said, “No.” And she said, “Because people wait too long to come and ask for help, and usually, when a couple comes in,” at least this was her experience, this may not be generally true, she said, “One of them has already called an attorney.” So they’ve reached the point of resignation. So what I love about your example is you’re talking about a company that does well, I think I know who you’re talking about, and they’re very successful. But they know that continuing to do what they’ve always done, or waiting until there’s a crisis, neither of those is optimal. What’s optimal is, let me call Peter, maybe they bring you in every six months, or whatever it happens to be, and let’s just, I like to say lean out, instead of leaning in, which narrows our field of vision. Lean out and look at things in this more integrated way. Does that kind of describe what it is they’re doing?

Peter Sandeen 

Yeah, a lot of it is just being able to look at it from the outside because whenever you’ve worked on a project for long enough, you start to get very farsighted, or shortsighted. I keep forgetting which is which. But anyway, it’s hard to see very close. 

Constance Dierickx

Nearsighted.

Peter Sandeen 

Thank you. So leaning out, leaning back, seeing what is really going on, if there’s an opportunity that they’ve missed, is there a risk they’ve missed? Yeah, that’s a very big part of it. But I think that’s very true, the marriage counseling example, I think is brilliant. And that is often the case with business. Obviously, much more likely success, in a way. I don’t know, what’s the success rate, and how do you even define success in marriage counseling, but anyway.

Constance Dierickx

Luckily, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. My own is happy.

Peter Sandeen 

There are those clients who will come when they are doing very well, like I talked with someone, I think, two days ago, who has been growing her business very quickly. It’s going really well. And she was like, “I don’t know how this is going to continue. I used my ideas, and I know these aren’t going to work forever.” She was very interested in getting some help with continuing the growth of the business. So going from what it is now, I think it was only some hundreds of thousands, she wanted to reach a million, and then 10 million. That’s a whole different thing. What she’s doing now is not going to take her there, like the things that she’s doing now with her business. It’s still a relatively small one, it’s not going to get there. And similarly, this was a client, I think we actually had a chat about this some time ago, a client who runs a business in an industry was growing really well, and then it plateaued for the last six months. Nothing has really worked. Before that, record-breaking month after record-breaking month. I asked her, “How are your competitors doing?” And they’re all going out of business. She’s just plateaued. So looking at it as, okay, we first saw certain risks that apparently plenty of competitors didn’t. So a lot of the value when you’re doing well, it’s not about let’s increase the speed even more. That’s possible, but it’s usually not very consistent. You start taking bigger and bigger risks if you’re trying to run faster and faster. Whereas, if you get to a very steady pace, then just make sure there aren’t some twigs on the way that you’re going to fall over.

Constance Dierickx

It’s so interesting, because we’re sort of back to making decisions based on the data that you’re looking at. So you just pointed out an example of someone who is doing very well, but was wondering about what to do next because there was this plateau. But her reference data was her own rather than an external one and you helped her see that, which is great. It reminds me of the tremendous disasters that happen in business when people are looking at the wrong data or they’re looking at it in the wrong way. I’m thinking about the Wells Fargo debacle in the US with the big bank Wells Fargo that was doing extremely well in the retail banking sector. They were just growing like crazy. The leaders knew that they were outpacing their peers. So it wasn’t that they were just looking internally, they were looking externally. But they failed to ask an important question. What does it mean? What is this data telling us? Unfortunately, the story behind it ended up being quite terrible, and it’s public knowledge that they got in a lot of trouble and the CEO was removed and other executives and blah, blah, blah. So, I think this conversation with you makes me realize even more that it’s not just looking at the same old data. It’s like looking around, and also asking questions about what is it telling us. In the case of this person, this woman, it wasn’t telling her the terrible story that she feared. It actually was the opposite. And you know Dorie Clark, right? Yeah. You know Dorie, and Dorie and I are friends. She wrote the book recently, The Long Game. She talks about raindrops. Sometimes, when you have a big goal, and you’re taking a big risk, like you were saying, it doesn’t usually happen that you’re just deluged with success all of a sudden. It’s a little bit more incremental. So she talks about paying attention to small things that tell you that you’re on the right road. I think that’s something you’re really good at. On the other hand, it’s also important for people not to misinterpret raindrops. So you get this anecdotal information, your uncle or your next door neighbor gives you some kind of praise and enthusiasm for something that’s completely irrelevant to what you’re trying to do. You see people sometimes pay more attention to who they hang out with at the local pub than an expert.

Peter Sandeen   

Quite often. I think, also, like on a bit more serious note, although that is true, yeah, it happens as well. But in, let’s say, larger companies, there’s usually a bit more people involved in the decisions. So maybe one uncle’s opinion isn’t usually so strong. 

Constance Dierickx

One would hope.

Peter Sandeen 

One would hope, okay, fair enough. But one client comes to mind, sells very high ticket solutions to businesses, and they made one sale to one industry, and suddenly the entire company, well, not the entire company, but the entire marketing and sales side of the company was like, “Brilliant, we found a new niche.” I was listening to it in sort of slight disbelief, like, I’m missing something. You just told me about one client who came. What are you not telling me? Like, I’m not hearing that this is a brilliant niche. And turns out it’s fairly low profit margin, there’s high competition in that, and finally, oh, yeah, we just got the best referral possible to this one company. So it was like, okay, so we learned nothing from this. So maybe we don’t start shifting the business towards this new niche when the others are doing well. So, it’s easy to get sidelined by very positive data, especially if you haven’t seen equally positive data, or equally surprising positive data in a while. It’s a very shiny light in darkness in a way. It stands out so much that it’s hard not to get fixated on it a bit too much.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah. I mean, in research, we know that generalizing from a too small sample or a scenario that’s not relevant, that overgeneralizing leads people astray. You go out and drive and you see three people driving Teslas and you say, “Oh, my gosh, everybody’s buying Teslas?” Well, everybody’s not buying Teslas but some people are, and it can just completely change your direction. I sometimes hear from CEOs that a board member will say something in a board meeting about, “Well, I think we should really consider going into the subscriptions. We should have a subscription model, or we should have a loyalty program.” Good grief. The problem with it being somebody on a board or your CEO saying it as opposed to the guy at the pub is that there’s a tremendous amount of power there. I mean, do you sometimes find yourself having to help somebody manage a suggestion from somebody above, like, you’re helping a CMO go back and explain to the CEO why his or her brilliant ideas are not so brilliant? 

Peter Sandeen 

Unfortunately, often, yes. It usually comes down to two things. Either the CEO or whoever is higher up genuinely is just clueless. That doesn’t happen too often. But it does, sometimes. They’re just genuinely not very good at the thing that they’re commenting on. Generally, this is very unusual. But the other option is that they are sort of slightly unclear of what problem they’re trying to solve. So they’ve had this idea of, okay, here’s an opportunity, or here’s the thing that would help us get more leads or get us more sales or whatever it is. But they’re not clear on what problem are we solving with it? Or, is it really the best opportunity we have? Those are really the key criteria, or the key questions like, is it a problem worth solving? Or is it one of the best opportunities we have? There’s very little use, usually, there’s exceptions, but usually, you shouldn’t go after minor opportunities, unless they’re very easy to do. But if it’s a significant thing, it should be the best opportunity, not just an opportunity. If it’s, “We should try this thing, like, go try LinkedIn advertising.” That’s one that has come up a few times. As soon as the marketing person brings this up, the CMO or whatever their title is, and we talk about it, and they are worried, but they’re like, “Well, I guess I need to try this.” It’s not that hard, usually, to say, does it make sense or not? From the outside, it can be pretty clear. Is it sensible to try? And if it is sensible to try, how do we do it so that we can, then, very quickly, with low budgets, go back to the CEO and say, “We tried it. We don’t see how it would become profitable. We spent this much money, and we only got two leads. We get far cheaper leads elsewhere.” Part of this is that when you have the useful data, then it’s pretty easy to quantify things. I could go on for hours about this, if you’re not doing pure branding advertising, where you’re just hoping that people will see you in a positive light down the road some years after and by, if you’re not doing that, then it becomes easy to measure things because you can see, well, how many of these people who saw this ad clicked it? How many of those became leads? How many of those bought something? And so on. So data helps, but also then finding a way to potentially appease the CEO, or by doing some sort of a managed test of like, well, let’s give it a go. Let’s not spend a lot of time on it. Let’s just test it, do it quickly, so that we can go back a week later, or two weeks later and say,, “Hey, we went with your idea, and we tried this. We don’t really see that it would work for us because of this and this. If you really insist on us doing it more then, yes, obviously, we’ll do more, but we have other opportunities.” I don’t think a single person has ever argued with that. It’s very hard to argue with it when you have a compelling question like, “Hey, thanks for the idea. We did it. It didn’t work. Do you want us to spend more money on it?”

Constance Dierickx

I think that story that you just told, or the example that you just gave, is really important for people to remember. What I see happening too often is somebody who’s got a higher position than you, more authority, more power, more influence, whatever, makes a suggestion, and the expert on the team is quick to argue. It’s like a reflexive argument, which ends up getting them nowhere. It gets nobody anywhere, but it does create a needless tension. What you’re really recommending is, think about it, and if it’s possible to do a little experiment, I love doing little experiments that are not that intrusive, not that expensive. And then, you get a little bit of feedback and information that is behavioral. It’s, are people responding or not? So I love that. It also makes me realize how often people ask other people whose opinion is not necessarily that valuable for feedback. I’m in several online communities, and somebody was asking for feedback on a book title, and without knowing anything about — now, I know the person who’s asking for the advice, I know what she does, and she’s brilliant at it, but the feedback she got back was 95% it irrelevant, and in fact it was dumbing down. I guess, marketing might be one of those areas where everybody thinks they know more than they do. I hope I’m not in that camp, actually. Well, I was smart enough to call you up and ask for your help with something. But I think it’s so interesting how we just reach for the easy. Do you know the story about the guy who lost his keys, and he’s on his hands and knees under a streetlamp? First day of graduate school, our professor told us this. He’s on his hands and knees under a streetlamp, kicking up dust and gravel, getting dirt all over, and a second person comes up and says, “What’s wrong?” And he goes, “Oh, I lost my keys.” And he goes, “Oh, I’ll help you look.” And he gets on his hands and knees, and now they’re both digging around in the dirt. Finally, the second guy looks up and he goes, “Well, were you close to here when you lost your keys?” And he goes, “No, I lost him over there in the alley.” And he goes, “Why are we looking here?” You know the answer, right? “Because the light is better.” What I love about it is my first reaction. I think it was my first day of graduate school, actually. It was Dr. De Castro, John De Castro. My first reaction was, well, how can anyone be that stupid? And then I backed up, and I thought, wait a second. That’s a wonderful analogy. It’s analogous to so many things. We do the easy thing. We do what I call, we fall into this ‘wiziwig’ trap, which is what I see is all there is. I think what you do is you help people explore in territory and in ways and with sufficient light so that they come to understand things they didn’t before. So I thank you for the conversation. But I also just thank you for your practice because I know I’ve benefited from it and I know other people have. But to wrap up, I want to ask you a couple questions. You are free to answer in any way you want, or to say, I don’t want to answer that. What is the best advice that you’ve ever gotten about making important decisions?

Peter Sandeen 

I think it’s just taking a bit of time. For me, personally, it is to listen to my intuition a lot more than I would otherwise. So I don’t know if that works for everyone. I don’t know. I mean, it might be. I genuinely don’t know if that’s good advice for everyone. But, for me, it certainly is, especially when things are topics that I know enough about. It’s not that hard for me to go through logical thinking. It’s then, ultimately, like, well, my intuition or whatever you want to call it, this sort of sense of what is the best option,usually ends up being the best option, even if I can’t perfectly articulate it immediately. So just getting more attuned with that has been very helpful for me. Again, I don’t know if this is generally good advice. It just worked very well for me.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, it’s what works for you. I think a lot of successful people I know describe intuition. When I talk to them a little bit more, we realize that a big chunk of that intuition is pattern recognition. So it’s hard to have intuition that works well for us when we’re very young because we don’t have this experience base to draw upon. But we draw on it anyway because we’re human. What is the advice that you’ve gotten that is so horrible that you feel like you should warn the listener?

Peter Sandeen

Well, I already mentioned this, but since we’re talking about marketing, I have this vendetta against branding marketing. However, it’s not bad. You can do it in a very clever way. But whenever the advice is in between the lines, what the advice says is, let’s just spend money on marketing and hope that eventually it will come back to us. That’s the bad part.

Constance Dierickx

Spray and pray. 

Peter Sandeen

Yeah, you can do very effective branding marketing where you’re increasing how many people know of you and see you in a positive light and all those things that branding can do while you’re also getting leads or sales right away. So it doesn’t have to, at all, be one or the other. You can do both. I think all the best marketing does both. Yeah, I mean, that’s just, I think, one of the worst ideas, and I still see tons and tons of companies, big and small, do exactly that. They are doing marketing where there’s nothing measurable about it. So they can’t evaluate it. They don’t know if it’s working. It doesn’t even attempt to do anything like that. Or even if there is an attempt at something measurable, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to fail. That’s probably the worst advice, even if it is just in between the lines, but still. 

Constance Dierickx 

That made me think about all the incoming offers and persuasion that people try to do. I’d say most of it is, “Send us your money, and we will spray and pray on your behalf.” I have never, ever, ever, ever taken somebody up on that.

Peter Sandeen 

You’d be surprised that that’s not just small business owners or individual coaches or consultants that get those offers. They are wrapped in much nicer paper when it is to a billion dollar company, but the offers are still the same, “Give us a boatload of money and we’re gonna spray and pray.” Yeah, it’s just done on a bigger scale. But, again, the tactic itself that they’re promoting might be brilliant, but when it is done as a, hey, others got results from this, you should do it too, then it’s not usually very clever. There’s a very small likelihood it works. These are very reputable companies, I mean, doing both sides of this. Because if you do it with 100 companies, a few of them will get good results, and you get a few great testimonials, and then you go to the next one saying, “Hey, look at all these competitors of yours who got great results.”

Constance Dierickx

And that’s using social proof in a very nefarious way. It’s very dishonest. Yeah. Bob Cialdini, who wrote the book on influence, which is back there on my shelf, talks about — oh, you too, I should have known — that people can misuse the principles of influence for ill-gotten gain, if you will. One of the things that you and I spoke about, maybe a couple months ago, was SEO. I hear SEO, SEO, it feels like one of those bright shiny objects that people are talking about. Whenever there’s a bright, shiny object, then people come out of the woodwork to sell you the bright, shiny objects like, oh, I have this thing. I didn’t really, I didn’t feel like I had a grasp on that. Something was recommended to me and I decided not to go with it, and you actually helped me with that decision. Talk a little bit about what you see. First of all, what is SEO? I had to cave in and look it up at some point. What is SEO? And what can it do, especially for big companies that can make a substantial investment? And how do smaller companies use it to no avail?

Peter Sandeen  

SEO is search engine optimization. Basically, the idea of trying to show up in the search results on Google or other search engines. Even YouTube is actually the second largest search engine. So whatever search engine. The idea is that you make changes to your websites or other content so that it shows up there. It sounds amazing, and it can be very, very useful. So I’ll just be clear that I’m not saying it’s always a bad idea. It can be really good. The problem with it — first of all, I’m not an expert on SEO, which gives me a different perspective to it than than all the SEO experts, I guess — the problem with it is that you can’t see results very quickly. In almost any case, I mean, you can never expect any fast results. You can only expect or hope for results, maybe a few months down the line, if you’re doing very well, which probably means investing tens of thousands to it. It’s very unlikely, not impossible, but very unlikely that you find good help that isn’t very expensive help. Let’s say 99% of cheap SEO services are just garbage. That doesn’t mean they’re all garbage, it just means that there’s a ton of the really bad ones. So if you go to a networking event and throw a rock in the air, it probably hits some self-proclaimed SEO expert in the head. Again, there’s plenty of good ones as well, but there’s just that many more not good ones. So the reason why small businesses generally shouldn’t put a lot of effort into it is that it is unlikely to work unless you invest a lot. You can usually get much more consistent and more immediately profitable results with a similar investment of time and money. Large companies will more commonly benefit but it is still kind of contingent on a bunch of things. Are your target customers actually looking for what you offer or can you otherwise manage to get your content in front of them at the right moment, which is very difficult unless they’re actively looking for it. It can be that they’re looking for answers to problems that relate to what you do and so on. So there’s plenty of ways to do it. But it is not something I recommend very often. It is basically never what I recommend first because even if you get a ton of people to your website, or a ton of people see your videos, if they don’t convert them forward, then it’s all to no avail, anyway. Maybe that’s approximately what I told you. But that’s how I basically look at it as it is a very selectively good idea to do, but you have to be willing to spend a lot of time and money on it and wait for the results for quite a bit before you can even start to evaluate whether it makes sense to continue or not.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, and you referred me to someone who you regard as an expert, a legitimate expert in this. Stephan Spencer, you referred me to him and I watched a video or two that he had done. It just was very eye opening. Clearly, he’s just way beyond anything that, I mean, the difference is almost like, he’s doing archery with a really good bow and arrow, and he’s expert, and he hits the bull’s eye or near it every time, and the others are using a five-year-old’s version of a bow and arrow and they have a blindfold on. That’s sort of the image that came into my mind. Every profession suffers from this to some degree or another. But thank you. I think it’s a great service to my listener to have someone like you talk about it. It certainly saved me money. But more than that, it saved me time in making what, for me, was going to be a decision to make an investment that would have gone on for many months. The commitment was for months, and I don’t mind spending money when I think I’m getting value or I have evidence that I’m getting value. My own development is my favorite thing to spend money on. It’s been my best investment yet. So thank you. I think that’s just so helpful. And then my last —

Peter Sandeen 

I should add to it. It may very well make sense to get some of the basics of SEO done well, even if you’re a small business. That’s basically things that would make Google, for example, penalize you specifically so that no matter what happens, they’re not going to show your website. So some basics may make sense even for much smaller businesses to put up a little bit of money in, like some thousands, maybe, to just have an expert look. Again, it needs to be an actual expert, but someone to go over the website and just see that there’s nothing that is drastically flawed. It’s a much lower bar to reach.

Constance Dierickx

So, you’ve seen my website. So give me an example of a mistake that I might make or, maybe you don’t want to use me, but what’s a common mistake people make that Google’s gonna say no?

Peter Sandeen

So again, I’m not the expert. But there are things like how it works on mobile, how the headlines are marked up in the code, how the different images are loaded, how the different scripts are loaded, the technical aspects of it. So there are things that the website might look just fine, you might not be able to tell anything from just looking at it, a picture of it, but there may be those things as well. So if it is, for example, very difficult to understand, like you never used direct language to describe what you do, it’s going to be very hard for bots, essentially, to understand what the website is about. So it makes sense to have fairly direct language about what you’re about. But again, this goes over my head and I know the basics of it, but I think you better have an SEO expert on the show to get the details. That’s what I’m referring to as these basics that might get penalized without you or any visitor necessarily noticing anything off.

Constance Dierickx

But it also speaks to the need to have good technical expertise on your website. So hire somebody that understands that it’s not all how pretty it is and how appealing it is. But there are technical aspects to it that someone like me doesn’t know. I don’t know. When I had mine redone, I cared a lot about is that picture of me on the homepage good? Does it portray what I do accurately? And actually the biggest compliments I get on my website, they go like this: “Oh, nice to meet you.” And about 20 minutes in they go, “You know your website exactly matches who you are. The person on your website that I thought you were showed up for the meeting.” I’m like, oh, mission accomplished! Well, that’s probably a low bar.

Peter Sandeen 

I don’t think so. I think a lot of websites, whether it is big corporations or individual coaches or anything in between, a lot of them don’t really give a sense of what it is like to work with the company. For example, I work with some smaller businesses where it’s very clear that one of the main values they bring is that they’re not super strict. They are actually going to work with their clients to reach the results, they’re very easygoing, it’s easy to contact them and say, like, Hey, your thing isn’t working, what do I do, and they will be like, oh, we’ll do our best. And then the website might have looked like a faceless corporation that would absolutely not be expected to provide that sort of support, or be easygoing, or help with anything that they’re not directly going to build for. So making the website also feel like, okay, it is an easygoing company, they are people you can actually reach, you can actually get to know one person and get their direct number and reach out to them if you have a question. Your website should reflect that as well. So I think most websites don’t do that. So yes, it’s not a very high bar because it’s not that difficult to do. But it doesn’t mean that it’s still rare because most people designing websites are not, I don’t know if they’re not interested, or if they just don’t realize to do it, or they’re not good at it, but ultimately, most designers don’t look at the website as how do we get the right message across? It’s about what are the colors? Is this a big company or a small business? What industry? Okay, if it’s in the car industry, we’re gonna have a bunch of cars there. And it’s like, well, nothing wrong with that but that’s not really the end of the story. So I think your website, from that perspective, is very good.

Constance Dierickx 

No, I’m so glad we talked about this. I should acknowledge the contribution of my web designer, Lisa Larter’s company, to my website. It’s been up a few years, it’s held up, it’s undergone some changes, of course, as it should. But I love that explanation. It’s great. So I have two more questions. They’re quick. So what is the best decision that you’ve ever made?

Peter Sandeen 

I don’t know if it was a decision, but getting together with my wife. It was very much a snap decision. When I saw her, I was like, okay, mine, and luckily, she had the same exact reaction. So that is, by far, the best decision.

Constance Dierickx

The best decision. Do you know how often I ask people that question, and they say, choosing my spouse, marrying my spouse?

Peter Sandeen

I would hope it’s a high number.

Constance Dierickx

It’s a very high number. It’s interesting how often very successful professional men give that answer too. They will talk about their wife as an advisor and a supporter and often describe her. I’m being very binary here in how I’m talking about this. They often describe their spouse, let’s just say, or partner as being so integral to their ability to be successful professionally. So, it sort of incorporates emotional support, intelligence, insight, and all that. What’s the decision you’ve made that you’re most proud of? 

Peter Sandeen 

Oh, that’s a difficult one. I don’t really feel very proud of decisions. I think it’s more maybe the way that I make decisions that I can feel happy about. Like, I took things into account, or it was a kind of decision, or it wasn’t a quick reaction with emotions flared up, or I don’t know if there’s any single one. 

Constance Dierickx

Yeah. So, you’re focusing more on your process.

Peter Sandeen 

Yeah, I think, because it’s easy to judge decisions afterwards based on results. It’s just not very good. Or it’s not very clever because you should, in my opinion, judge decisions based on how it was made, what was the information available, how it was used, so that you can sort of learn something from it. Because even if you make the best decision using all the info you now have, outside forces might come up and just make things go wrong. It doesn’t mean that your decision was bad. It might have still been the best decision. So yeah, I can’t think of any specific decision I would be proud of.

Constance Dierickx

Well, you just actually gave me a Meta-Leadership answer, which is no accident because it’s one of the things that I admire about you. I don’t know if it’s instinct or what, but there’s a very persistent theme during the time I’ve known you that you are able to lean out and consider things in a more integrated way, and that is exactly what I observed in successful leaders and why I wrote that book. So that’s probably a good place to end. How can people find you, Peter? Tell me, what’s your website?

Peter Sandeen

PeterSandeen.com

Constance Dierickx

You are in Helsinki, Finland. But during the time I’ve known you, I have come to appreciate that you really work on Easterns. You’re very accommodating to US time zones. That makes it easy. Also, I know you have videos available. Where can people get your videos?

Peter Sandeen 

Well, there’s some old ones on YouTube, but I’m hopefully making some new ones. I guess I’ll put them on YouTube as well. But I think I’ll at least put them on LinkedIn and on my own website. So honestly, the best place is probably my website and LinkedIn. So I have a video that basically goes over the key points from an expert training I did on messaging, too, if someone’s interested to understand a bit more on like, how to actually look at messaging to make it more effective. That’s on my website. You should find it on the homepage, at least right now, it will be there.

Constance Dierickx

That’s great, and I’ll put in a plug. You have a weekly newsletter. You call it Friday Scribbles, and I love it because you have something about marketing, and you always have these interesting things like, ‘”Oh, I just read this great book, or I watched this video or I learned to play this new game,” or something that makes you very human and interesting. So I recommend people sign up for that. I read it every week, every single week without fail. I can’t say that about many. So thank you for being here. I’m gonna let you go back to the rest of your world. Having been in Helsinki one whole time in my life, I have to say, I loved it, and it looks like a wonderful place to live.

Peter Sandeen

Yeah, I think so too. I think it’s a very good place to live.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah. All right. We’ll talk soon.

Peter Sandeen 

Thanks for having me.

Outro  46:49  

The Decision Doctor will be back with more advice soon. Hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app and check out TheDecisionDoctor.com to receive the Meta-Leadership self-assessment and other no-cost resources. We’ll see you next time.