How to Attract New Clients as a Fractional CMO with Dean Waye

In episode 122, host Eric Dickmann talks with Dean Waye - CEO of WayeCreative, a copywriting firm helping businesses and fractional CMOs attract, impress, and lock in new clients.

Dean Wayne also co-hosts "This Audience Means Business," an interactive LinkedIn live show where he and his guests discuss and review company messaging.

For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit: https://fiveechelon.com/attract-new-clients-fractional-cmo-s8ep7/

A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.

The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at: 

https://fiveechelon.com

For additional information and insights, visit https://podcast.ericdickmann.com/

Be sure to check out Eric's other show, Beyond Expertise!

Transcript

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Eric Dickmann 0:31

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Today, I'm excited to have guests Dean Waye on the program. Dean is the CEO of WayeCreative, a copywriting company helping fractional CMOs attract to impress and lock-in clients. Dean also cohosts a LinkedIn live show called This Audience Means Business. Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean Waye 1:09

Hello. Your intro is way fancier than my intro, I like it. Very pro level.

Eric Dickmann 1:14

Well, thanks very much. I appreciate you being here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. One of the things that we've really been focusing on with this program is this whole idea of fractional executives, especially the fractional CMO space. And I was really intrigued when we connected on LinkedIn, and I saw that you were really focusing your business on helping fractional CMOs get their messaging right to sort of bring in those clients. So before we drill into that a little bit more, I'd love it if you could just share with the audience a bit of your background and sort of how you got into this space.

Dean Waye 1:46

I have had two lines of business pretty much since I was 14, 15, and on one, it was on a tech track and I was a software developer. I got my first job, paying job as a software developer at 14. And then I became a software project manager for a very long time, like big, big, massive projects. And then I went into tech sales and then I actually ended up in sales proper, which I never should have done. I'd made more money than I ever made in my career, but I was not suited to like that. And at the same time I had a copywriting career. My dad ran a bookstore, like, you know, as a manager of a little bookstore where we lived in a pretty remote place in Canada, and we could just read whatever we wanted. As long as we didn't break the spine of the book, that was a big deal. Cause then they could keep selling it. And I remember my first copywriting book was like 14, 15. And the idea that you could write something and then someday in the future, some stranger would read it and then do something based on you writing something just blew my mind. And I said, that's incredible. I like writing. I'm gonna learn how to do. And the whole thing is kept up. I ended up on the side, I had even just a few years ago, I had a company called Audience Team where I had about a dozen professional speakers around the US and Canada.

Eric Dickmann 2:57

Okay.

Dean Waye 2:57

I would write their webinars, I'd write their outbound email and lead generation campaigns and do their marketing and help 'em with their, you know, with their speaking and stuff. So a lot of experience in writing for live speakers and a lot of stuff, writing traditional copywriting. And then tech and then it all came together about 18, 20 months ago, going out on my own. And now I even write for sales people now, which are far easier to write for professional speakers than it is to write for sales people and what they're gonna say across a table to someone else, but it's very rewarding field. So I,have that as part of what I write for people.

Eric Dickmann 3:35

So when you help sales people, do you help them with their pitch decks?

Dean Waye 3:38

Yeah. The pitch decks and what they.

Eric Dickmann 3:41

Yeah. What do you think is the problem? Why do you think, uh, sales people struggle so much in knowing what to say?

Dean Waye 3:47

You cannot be successful over a long career in sales, unless you have like a really hardcore resiliency, you call it a thick skin, but really it's a resiliency for rejection, right? And what you do is over time you end up, some things will work for you, some kind of phrases or attitudes, or you know, whatever will work for you and you'll make your way through. And then you end up with is you don't wanna move out of that, even though the audience changes. And first thing I tell them when we start settling down, say, let's look at your pitch deck, let's look at these slides, let's figure out what phrases you're gonna say while this slide is up and stuff. And I say, I tell you, right from the beginning, I'm an advocate for the audience. I'm a specialist in audience attention. I wrote for tons of speakers. I know what we're gonna hook them with. I know how we're gonna keep their attention, and I know how we're gonna get it back if it wanders off. So I'm the advocate for them. So when I tell you this isn't gonna work, or this is better than that, it's not my opinion. It's the fact that someone else that I have to represent is in a chair. And we all know that the, the most senior decision maker in that room is the one who walks in late, and sits furthest away from your slide, and has the most other things pinging them while you're pitching to them. So their attention comes in little bits about the size of a thimble, and we need to make sure we grab it every time it's there.

Eric Dickmann 5:12

So when you look at the difference between a speaker, a salesperson and maybe website content, how do you look at framing those messages differently based on sort of those communication channels?

Dean Waye 5:26

Well let's say website content or email sequences and that kind of stuff you write for clients, right? All of that messaging lives on one of three levels. And once someone points it out to you, it's like someone points out how much squeaking there is with sneakers in a basketball game. And once someone points it out, you can't ever stop hearing all the squeaking

Eric Dickmann 5:45

That's so true.

Dean Waye 5:46

Right? So all content that you're gonna read, all commercial content, marketing content, all lives on one of three levels, right? There's informational, inspirational, and transformation. So the bottom level where almost all of it lives is informational. And that's just, you go to a website and the company's telling you here's who we are and what we. Just like lays it out, right? Inspirational is not sort of a woo woo, you know, kind of thing. It's very much a, you could be better, you could be a better company, you could be a better person, you could have a better career. Something could be better. And then that's usually as high up on the scale as a B2B communication marketing can ever go. And then transformational is you could be new and you normally only see that in certain B2C stuff, health, fitness, beauty, diet, you know, that kind of stuff. You could be a new person, or new company altogether. Almost no one you're trying to sell to in a B2B context is looking to become a new company. they're just looking to become a better version of what they are. And so if everything's down on informational and nothing in B2B, especially, you're not doing anything on the inspirational level, then there's nothing for them, they don't see themselves in your story. You're supposed to be telling them their story with you in it, not your story and hoping that they care,

Eric Dickmann 6:59

Yes. I think that is such an important point because I know when I get engaged with clients, you know, and I work mostly in the B2B space. That is the most common problem that you see. They're very excited about their products and services, and they love to share all of these things that those products and services can do. But it's all at that informational level. It's not anything that really connects to people on an emotional level.

Dean Waye 7:21

Since you work with mostly B2B, I have a little basketball squeaking tip for you. When you look at their pitch decks. Count up like, literally just like concentrate. Don't follow along the messaging, just treat it like it's like a painting. Look at a slide and look at how many times their name appears on the slide. It's not uncommon for their own name between the NDA disclaimer, on the bottom, the logo, something else on the top, half of every product has the name in the product name. So it's not unusual to see 3, 5, 7 times per slide. They've got their own name on a slide and it's invisible to them until you point it out.

Eric Dickmann 7:59

So as we talk about this whole fractional space, how did you get interested in helping fractional executives, particularly fractional CMOs with their messaging?

Dean Waye 8:09

It still exists, but I don't promote it anymore. I have basically a service a one hour at a time service called perfectlydescribed.com where I started writing on the advice of a strategy coach. I started writing people's. Summaries on LinkedIn, just the About section, not the whole page, nothing, just the About section. Just that little paragraph that people write about themselves. I started writing that for companies on their company page and for individuals and I did about 200 in a year. It's usually a one hour Zoom call. I give them a document ahead of time, like a Google doc. They fill in some raw information and then I just walk 'em through it, right? And one of the earlier people around month, two month three was a fractional CMO, I've never heard of any kind of fractional executive at all. Now I know hundreds, but back then, none. I said like, who hires a fractional executive and said, well, typically startups or businesses that are small enough, they know that they want a really high level person, but they're not going to pay what a high level person would cost full time, or basically they're not going to, when you think about it, when you hire an employee, you're paying for exclusive use of that employee.

Eric Dickmann 9:24

Right.

Dean Waye 9:26

And they're not ready to pay or can't afford exclusive use of a very, very experienced 20 plus year veteran CMO, but they can get almost everything they need right now for whatever 10 hours a week, 30 hours a month. However, whatever the engagement is structured, like. And then the other people who hire them are usually, it's a company that even that has one or more CMOs, but they have some kind of new service or product that they're launching. And so they bring in a fractional CMO. Usually that person is much more of a specialist, they're specialists in new product launches. They're product in, you know, so they've just done a lot of spinoffs, or there's like a smaller third set that you don't see very often of clients who are prepping. They wanna grow in a certain way at a certain rate so that they can be acquired for the maximum amount of money. And part of that is having an established sort of brand and presence, or at least in the domains that the acquirer would see and interact with. And so there are actually fractional CMOs who specialize in getting you acquired by making you look attractive.

Eric Dickmann 10:34

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, because you talked about the fact that fractional CMOs are typically people who come from industry, they have many years of experience. Now they're trying to apply that experience to multiple companies at once in a fractional role. But what do you see as they message themselves

Dean Waye 10:52

This is the hardest part for them. Partly because marketing it's a very different to coming up through like the ranks and marketing and being, you know, having a career in marketing. It's very different to convince strangers to buy or pay attention to a thing versus getting this stranger across the table from you to be interested in buy this thing, which is you. It's completely different, right? One is marketing marketing, and one is sales marketing. And so I mean, they're all experts, they're all solid in that field, but as soon as you have to like overlay a sales mechanism for them, they have two problems. This is the first one, they don't really have much experience selling and selling yourself is the hardest thing to sell.

Eric Dickmann 11:40

Agreed.

Dean Waye 11:41

The other aspect to it is very similar to how copywriters or graphic artists and certain other professionals sell themselves. The medium that you're selling through, like what you're showing, what your pitch deck looks like, how you say things and whatever. In my case, like what I write, right? It is the product. And so you're judged not only on your experience in the past, but what you're doing right now, talking to that prospect. I mean if my copy for my outreach and stuff sucked, no one's gonna hire me, even though I've got tons of big brands in my background that I've written for. And so the CMOs are in the same situation, right? They, their marketing really needs to be killer marketing because that's the first thing you're gonna get judged on is whether or not, you know, you're good at marketing yourself to that prospect. They wanna see their future in what, in what you're showing them about you. So they have an extra challenge that makes it even tougher than, you know, selling yourself as an industrial workflow engineer freelancer or consultant, right? I mean, no one expects you to show up with anything related to your work cause your work is different than how you would sell or market yourself. Marketers, CMOs, very tough. They have a tough road.

Eric Dickmann 12:58

I think that's so true. I think you nailed it too when you talk about this idea of self-promotion, it's just not something, especially if you're coming maybe from a Fortune 500 background, you know, you promoted the company, you promoted your products and services, you're not the number one person in that company. You're promoting the company as a whole or your CEO or the management team, and it's very different than to go off on your own. I would just add that another thing that can be complicated from what I've seen and experienced myself is typically when you work for a larger organization, you play a part in something, but there are lots of other pieces of that puzzle. And it's much harder to look and say, I'm taking credit for this result because you just played a part in it. When you're working at a smaller organization, it's much easier to say I ran the whole strategy, I did everything, and this was the result. At a bigger company. That's much harder to say.

Dean Waye 13:49

Yeah. And the CMOs of fractional CMOs who come out of a long career in say Fortune 500 or Fortune 100, or even Fortune 1000 marketing, right? A lot of marketing yourself and having that messaging just really dialed in and instantly standing apart from the other four or five fractional CMOs that some prospects is looking at. Like it's, if you, your skillset is not the creative end of that messaging creation anymore. Your skillset is strategy and planning and managing teams and identifying, you know, people who should be, you know, promoted up or moved out and getting the right, you know, pieces in place. You delegated the creative stuff ages ago. And now suddenly you're being judged on the creative end and the creative end might only be like a very thin wafer between you and all the stuff you're sort of stack in between, but it's what you're judged on until you can get across the table from someone and impress 'em with you know, how you speak and what you say, but to get to the table, you need that like really killer creative end. And that's that that little layer is what I felt for.

Eric Dickmann 14:55

Hmm. I would add something else into the mix as well. If you're a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman, you know, a real estate agent, people immediately have a preconceived notion

Dean Waye 15:07

They know what box in their head you belong to. Yeah.

Eric Dickmann 15:09

That's exactly right. You don't have to explain it. You might wanna explain your specialty if you're a doctor, but they know what a doctor is. When you say you're a fractional CMO, a lot of times it results in some blank stares. It requires that extra step of actually explaining what it is that you do, and then trying to put your expertise on top of that and say why you may be the best in this particular area. But how do you help fractional CMOs overcome just that barrier of understanding of what the job even is?

Dean Waye 15:36

Well, fortunately, that starts by being a prospecting problem. Because obviously if you're talking to most, in my experience, most Fractional CMOs actually target CEOs

Eric Dickmann 15:48

Hmmm.

Dean Waye 15:49

to make the connection, and get a conversation going. And a CEO knows what a CMO is. So they know fractional CMOs. Also, it helps in a way that the sort of first, at least it seems to me, the first group of executives that went fractional were CFOs.

Eric Dickmann 16:06

That's right.

Dean Waye 16:07

And then it moved into HR. A lot of businesses, for instance, they might want a fractional HR director or Fractional VP of HR because they have a specific need, like one that I know she specializes in hiring and most of her clients for whatever reason are seasonal. So they have massive hiring spikes and then they don't need someone like her the rest of the year. They need her like every April or May. And so that's great. So usually the way that they get around it, uh, the fraction CMOs for not having to explain who they, who they are, what they do. And as a copywriter, I can tell you it's very frustrating. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've explained, I'm a copywriter and they think I'm some kind of lawyer. By default, they think a copywriter's a lawyer, most people, right outside of marketing. So the way that they avoid the Fractional CMOs, the way they avoid it is they just go straight to CEOs and market, try to do all their marketing CEOs or members of a board. Is those people at least know what a CMO is. And once they have that, the fractional part usually just is either self-explanatory or it helps them, you know, get past it. So essentially the answer to your question is it's all about which audience you're talking to.

Eric Dickmann 17:18

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. I've noticed a lot of people on LinkedIn are getting a little bit more creative in that second line underneath your name and talking a little bit more about what they do as opposed to just listing off a more recognizable title, because you've gotta cut through this noise. And there are a lot of interesting new positions that are showing up, growth marketer is an example. That's not a position that's been around forever, but you ask people what it is and you know, they'll scratch their head a little bit in terms of defining what it is. So I, I think that's interesting. So as you start to work with some of these fractional executives, sort of, what is the process that you go through to help them refine their messaging? You talked a little bit about LinkedIn profiles, about websites, what do you start looking at and how do you help them refine that message? So that it's tailored specifically for them.

Dean Waye 18:52

I still use most of the questionnaire. It's not a very long questionnaire, but these are not comfortable sessions. People like to think of themselves as being in one box, whereas a stranger or a prospect will automatically put them in another box. People don't like it, but I still use that question a lot. One of the things we go through, a few of the questions is like, they're going to be looking at multiple people just like you. Why are you the safer choice among those top five?

Eric Dickmann 19:21

Yes.

Dean Waye 19:22

Because the ones who are seeing like the riskier choice. They're gonna be dropped pretty quickly. It all comes back to like the number one question when you're marketing and or selling in B2B, the number one question that you might never be asked, but you need to provide an answer for is from the employee prospects, cEO's point of view. Why is it safe for me to vouch for you in here company? Because no matter how much money you might make or save my company as a vendor, if I would end up losing my job, if you blew up or I even lost reputation, then I'm gonna pass. And we'll just find, we'll go with whoever the biggest player in the field is. And so if you don't have an answer for that prepared, you don't answer that question necessarily directly, but your marketing needs to sprinkle that answer throughout so they feel safe. I mean, what is B2B sales anyway, except a series of you and the prospect, allowing each other to get closer to each other until you finally have a deal, right? Nobody closes a big B2B sale in one meeting, right? It's just a series of steps for, let me get closer. Okay, you can come closer. All right, let me get closer again. Okay. You can get closer. Let's have the initial pitch meeting, let's do the second deep dive meeting and so on

Eric Dickmann 20:39

It's building that trust, right? I love the way you phrase that, presenting yourself sort of as a low risk option compared to maybe others that they're looking at. But I think one of the other challenges that I often see is that businesses think that they are going to be most comfortable with somebody who comes from their industry, right? It comes from exactly the same business that they're in, which is really difficult to find. And yeah, if you can find somebody like that, maybe that's a great fit. But in general, When I talk to clients, I generally put things into, you know, the two basic buckets, right? B2B and B2C. Generally, if you find a marketer, that's a B2B marketer and you're a B2B business, you're probably gonna be pretty safe with their skillset, B2C e-commerce, you know, there's some specific skillset and you could probably argument that maybe selling into the public sector is a little bit unique or something like that. But in general, B2B B2C are the two big categories I look at. How do you help people message to that so they can say, I come from this background, you come from that background, but we're still a good match.

Dean Waye 21:43

Okay. So the, the next two questions that we go to of the four big questions that we need to do after all the preliminaries are done are, what big impact can you promise this customers, where if they give you money, you can shortcut them to this positive future. Right? They're always in a negative present. If there was no negative present, there's no need to look for a solution. So they're in a negative present. What big impact can you have that shortcuts them, and why are you the easy choice for this? Do you do everything for them? Do you put boots on the ground? Do you just deal with strategy? Do you make sure you bring in a team, you have all the relationships with agencies. Like how is it easy to just give you the problem and forget about it? And then the last part is I tell a story about a horse lady. So I say, imagine that you are going to for the first time in your life, try to find a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a mental health counselor, a therapist, let's call it, right? So first time in your life, and you're gonna go wherever you would normally go to start a search, you're gonna go to Facebook or Google or LinkedIn or wherever, right? And then the next day, you know, your spouse, so how's the search going you say? Yeah. So I've looked at five, right? Five's about the most that anyone can keep in their head without a spreadsheet. If there's multiple things to think about, four of them. So you see how automatically, cause this is how our brains work, we amalgamate most of them into one of 'em, you go to their office, it's like in a strip mall or, you know, it's a converted Victorian house downtown that used someone used to live in, and now a bunch of offices are medical center, right? And you go in, you sit down and usually she asks you questions and you talk about yourself, and then there was the horse lady. What she says is forget about the office. You're gonna come out to this very nearby farm. I'm gonna be on a horse and I'm gonna put you on a gentle sweetest horse, and we're just gonna walk, take the horses and walk them down this nice path. And I'll ask you questions, and you know, you talk. Now, not everyone's gonna want the horse lady. But she's remembered the next day. And she is not consolidated into one of the other four who looks so identical and couldn't put in enough marketing imagination to delineate themselves from the crowd that they all, they're basically just one therapist and the horse lady. And the horse lady, like I said, doesn't get everybody, but she gets a disproportionate amount compared to any of the other. All of the value that I provide in that exercise, cuz they just give me details for the rest of it. All the value I provide is in that question, figuring out for what they've done, how you are the horse lady for the people who are looking at you and your competitors. That's it.

Eric Dickmann 24:27

it's building that trust. I hear that over and over.

Dean Waye 24:29

You need an angle that builds on all those components, right? Why is it gonna be easier? How do I know you're the safe choice? How do I know we are going to be a good fit? How do you get into a box in their head? This goes way back to marketing in the sixties and recent trout and positioning all that stuff, right? Like how do you have your own thing in there? Because if they don't remember you the next day, why did you do all that work?

Eric Dickmann 24:51

So when you're helping people, where do you get the most pushback?

Dean Waye 24:55

Oh, I get the most pushback, usually on why it's easy and what sort of big impact they can have. People tend to over supply information on why it's easy, but it's irrelevant information and they tend to undersupply how they can have a big impact for their client because they're reticent to sort of commit.

Eric Dickmann 25:17

Yes.

Dean Waye 25:18

And the problem is in all of this marketing communication, underlying all of it is the promise with a capital P right? There's a Promise being made where if you do, if you bring me in, you will have this and people are great, but what they'll do is, the CMOs, especially it's different with the most small businesses, but with the CMOs, they fall back into their marketing language. And then we have to stop usually, and I talk to them about the four types of resistance in sales, right? There's the inertia first of all, I mean in B2B. It's almost always easier to do nothing than to do something, right? And then there's reactants, we've all felt reactants in a sales situation,. We feel like the salesperson is forcing our options to disappear and sort of fencing us in. We all hate that feeling. And then there's, what's the other one? Inertia, reactance, there's distrustive claims. This is the main one for marketers, right? Marketers understand that most people distrust, claims, they distrust claims from salespeople and for marketers, but they don't admit it. And what they'll do is they'll fall back on their language. It's sort of overblown, corporate, meaningless sentences. And that's where it gets uncomfortable. Cuz I have to say no, that's not gonna work. You're talking to one person. Even if we're writing something on a website, we don't know who that person is. It's still one person. And that's where we have to push back and push back and push back and get down until we get to a truth. A truth that they're willing to stand on and say, yeah, I believe this is true to my knowledge. And then that's the assertion that we use to put into their angle and figure out how they're the horse lady.

Eric Dickmann 27:05

it's A well known statistic, right? That the CMO tends to be the shortest lived C-suite executive. And oftentimes it's because there are unrealistic expectations of marketing and how quickly campaigns and programs can really turn around measurable results to revenue. And I think that's one of the reasons that many marketers are reluctant to commit to specific results because they know it takes time. And if you go into a client and say, well, we're gonna start this program, but it's gonna be a year until you can see the results from it, they'll be like, I don't know if I wanna pay you for a year. I want results today. And that's always a tricky kind of line to walk is how can you show short term results while knowing that some of the exercises that you're gonna go through are gonna take a little bit longer to produce meaningful results.

Dean Waye 27:48

Yeah. I ended up, it didn't come right away. I was well over a year into this of helping fractional CMOs, you know, with the first part of their process, like getting the client and doing some work for the client. And then as they start coming up for renewal, they wanna get re-up some clients you just don't want 'em to re-up you hope they'll just like, forget about you, right? And you can go on, but other clients you want the re-op, right? And they would come back cause it had been months since I'd needed to work for them. They'd come back and say, I've got a problem, and it would break down into one of two things. We didn't actually like achieve much and the client seems bored and ready to look for someone else or I made promises and they're not, I made concrete promises and we are not gonna hit the targets.

Eric Dickmann 28:32

Hmmm.

Dean Waye 28:33

And so if they come early enough, I said, you can never guarantee that you're gonna hit any KPI that you promise a client cuz you don't control the marketplace.

Eric Dickmann 28:43

Yes.

Dean Waye 28:43

So, I don't think we wanna concentrate on that. I said, instead, what we'll start doing and start adding in for them is I had always thought that the work for the CMOs and the work I was doing with sales teams and sales enablement stuff, and writing what sales people are gonna do and say, I always thought of them as very separate businesses, but I realized you don't have to rely on market metrics or you hit a certain NPS score, right or something like that. If the sales lead, if the head of sales loves you and would be afraid to lose you, it would be a very brave CEO to go to the board and say, the head of sales thinks this guy walks on water, this gal walks on water, they're producing numbers like they've never seen, but I wanna fire 'em. And you're like, why would you fire like a sales formula that's working?

Eric Dickmann 29:33

Yeah, exactly.

Dean Waye 29:34

And so I said, try to shy away from promises around, you know, net promoter score or whatever your market awareness or whatever. And instead, let's focus on taking what we've done for marketing at a strategic level, all that messaging and branding and stuff, and I'll transform it into tactical stuff that sales can use every day.

Eric Dickmann 29:53

I like that.

Dean Waye 29:54

And because I said like, you know, you can't rely on one thing, but sales, you could be very clear every day, whether sales is happy with you, so let's focus on that, cuz it's doable. And so it helps them preempt that danger that they get to the end of their 9 month or 12 month engagement or 24 month game. And all of a sudden, no one really cares if they're cycled out and replaced with another body.

Eric Dickmann 30:17

Yeah, the relationship between sales and marketing, especially with B2B companies and long sales cycles is so important

Dean Waye 30:25

there's no CMO in the world that happens to have a head of sales who is happy with the leads they're getting for marketing. Like it's not a thing,

Eric Dickmann 30:34

Yeah, they always want more.

Dean Waye 30:36

They always want more, they always want better, they always want, we wanna waste less time on people who really aren't considered leads and so on. So yeah, so it's a wide open market. As a CMO, if you're willing to say, go to the head of sales and say, I've got this stuff to do at the high level, and I'm gonna around the branding and the messaging and our positioning and making sure we stick in people's heads and they remember us the next day. And then once that's done probably around months 4 to 6, we're gonna take all that and we're gonna make it very concrete, tactical that your folks can use to book more appointments, to get more demos, to get in more rooms, to get in front of more people, and then just execute on that. Then you will win the re-up because nobody's gonna fire someone who's that good.

Eric Dickmann 31:18

I think that sound advice and something we should all take to heart, especially with these kinds of clients. And I know we're sort of coming to the end of our time here, but I'd love it if you could just tell us a little bit more about the show that you're doing on LinkedIn live, The Audience Means Business. I love the title. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dean Waye 31:34

We do it three days a week and we have a theme for every day. So on Tuesdays, the guests I show up and the guests will come up with social media stuff, LinkedIn pages, all that. And I will actually walk through it and explain what someone's doing right, what they're doing wrong, what they could do better, and so on. Then on Wednesdays, we have Website Wednesdays. And they either give me a search term and I'm sharing my screen the whole time, everything's done live. There's no prep. I don't know what I'm gonna get on any day of the week. They'll give me either a search term, we'll put it into Google. We'll go to the 10th page of Google, like where nobody goes. Halfway down the page. I will just pick a website. Usually it's some company and then we'll go through and I will rewrite it in real time. Cuz you have a little Chrome plugin tool, it's free, that lets you change all the text on a website once you've loaded it in your browser. So I will rewrite that company's headlines and everything else in real time in the course of like 20 to 30 minutes, and explain like what I'm doing and why this works better, and what we're doing the whole thing, it's almost like a tutorial with someone's actual website and then on Thursdays, it's more wide open and we usually discuss tools and how people achieve stuff, like how do marketers or sales people, like what do they use this for? What do they do that for? What exactly are they doing with like this funnels, service, click funnels, or drop funnels? What exactly are they doing on Canva when they're making these social media type things and we'll actually show. How they're doing it and why they're doing it, how much it costs, whether we've used it and recommended it, and so on,

Eric Dickmann 33:07

I love that. I think it's a great format and anxious to check it out myself. And so I I'd love it as we kinda wrap up here, can you just tell people where they can find you on LinkedIn, where they can find your company information, and I'll make sure that we get that linked up in the show notes as well.

Dean Waye 33:22

I might be the only Dean Waye W A Y E on LinkedIn, and so that could work. And then I think my email is probably on the screen. deanwaye@creative, and wayecreative.com is my website. So there's a form there to contact me, they can see portfolio of work. As you can imagine, a lot of stuff's under NDA, but the stuff that isn't is, you know, examples of that are there for what I've done stuff, including stuff for brand names that I'm sure they've heard of.

Eric Dickmann 33:50

Dean, that's great. you know, One of the things that I love is there are all these great platforms where people can consume information freely. You don't have to go out and pay for it. You can have some great interactive content. And so I love it when creators like yourself are going out and putting this kind of valuable information in the hands of the people that need it, especially those in the Fractional CMO space. So thank you so much for being a guest on the show today.

Dean Waye 34:12

it's great to meet you.

Eric Dickmann 34:15

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.