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What's your vision? Featuring James Hipkin. Podcast Session 1.
2,080 words · 3 speakers
Tell me about your vision.
Well.
My vision is simple.
I want to help. Business owners. Take full advantage of marketing to drive. Growth. And. When I talk about this, I talk about.
Really powerful and effective marketing. Is is a two sided coin. It creates value for customers as well as for the business.
And that distinction is really important. That distinction really informs an awful lot of how we look at marketing and how we look at. The the relationship that you need to build with customers and with your audience in order to create a sustainable. Entity that, you know, brings value to you as a business owner, but also brings value to your audience. And that.
When I audit websites, when I audit. Digital marketing programs. The most common problem I see. Is an absence of strategy.
And that absence of strategy, what it with an end result is. You know, you've you've got a successful business. You've stopped DIYing this. You've hired a digital marketing agency. You've told them to go. You know, do stuff. And they're, you know, nobody comes to work with the intention of doing a bad job. They're going to go out and do the best they can, and they're going to. Probably do a better job executing the tactics than you are. However. Pretty tactics without strategy is still digital noise.
And digital noise does not build your business.
What does?
Building your business is involved by, and it's an old, old idea. It's a direct marketing axiom. Get the right message to the right person at the right time.
For the right price.
Prices, it becomes less of an issue if you're building on that kind of issue. Because what you're looking for is you want the sale to be the next logical step in their journey. So they don't feel like they're being tricked into something. They feel like they're giving value and getting value.
Wow, I, I'm, well, I'm getting more and more excited.
James, where would you say this vision, amazing vision that I agree with, come from?
Many years ago, I was working when I was an executive vice president at a large ad agency in Chicago. We were working with a telecommunications company and they were having huge problems with, with churn. People signing up and then leaving.
So they hired us to help them develop a loyalty program. And part of that effort was we commissioned a real, a research study. We hired a guy who specialized in loyalty research.
I don't remember any of the details from the output from the research study, but I remember one sentence that he said in his preamble. Now, context, this is a guy whose profession, who's years and years of experience doing research on customer loyalty for many different brands in many different categories. And he said, 90% of loyalty problems can be traced to a flawed sales process.
So that one sentence got me really thinking about the sales process and what's involved and what does he, what parts of it are flawed? And how, how are you?
How can you change your mindset around these things so that you're generating sales for the right reasons, getting the right message to the right person at the right time? And building a, and then another thing is I did more research into this.
A guy named Reichelt wrote a book called The Loyalty Effect. It's really old.
But I imagine the ideas are still valid. And he points out that when you analyze customer bases, a loyal customer brings revenue to a business in five different ways.
You know, it basically builds on the concept that the most important sale is not the first sale, it's the second sale.
Because if you can sell them the second time, the chances you'll sell them a third, fourth, fifth time are exponentially improved.
Yes.
And, and when I did work with companies like, well, Bank of America and Visa. I've had both of them as clients at various times and we've had the opportunity to do analysis in their customer data. You know, the a one to two percent improvement in loyalty would generate anywhere from a sixty to an eighty percent improvement in the net present value of the customer base.
And that leverage is because of this idea that loyal customers contribute revenue to the business in five different ways.
So Jenner having strategy, underpinning, understanding who your customers are. You may have heard that described as the customer persona or the customer avatar. They're kind of synonyms for the same concept. Who is your customer demographically? What are their characteristics? What is the pain they're trying to solve? And what is the gain that they had get from working with you? The the customer avatar. And then the other side of that coin. Everything, you know, everything in life is two sided. The other side of that coin is mapping the customer journey. Understanding what events happen in their life that cause them to start height.
I think I need to consider this, whatever it might be. And then they go into consideration mode where they start doing research around. What are their options? What are their choices? I haven't done this for a while. But you know what's out there? And then that moves into the prospecting phase where they're making a choice around. Okay, I've got two or three different. Options here, which one's the best for me? And then there's the bottom of the funnel, which is the decision making process. Everybody understands and recognizes the marketing funnel, which I just described. But what they don't do is actually sit back and document. What are the questions and obstacles at each stage of this?
Process from the customer's perspective.
Because when you can do that, circling back to the hub and spoke idea that I talked about before. Now you can create a content and messaging strategy. That's in alignment with. What the customers are looking for.
At the stage that they're in in their journey. This builds trust. It builds relationship. And it means that at the end of the process, the purchase decision is the next logical step in their journey. Versus being tricked into buying something that they're not sure about.
The value that you shared today, James, is amazing. And to me, this information is not new, but to our audience, probably most of it is. And I can, I can see if they grasp what you just said, they'd be like, their mind would be blown into like, oh my gosh, I had no idea what this could be. What, oh my gosh, I do not think this way.
And that's the key thing. You did not think this way. Nothing I said was you, was revolutionary. Everything I said was stuff that everybody will go, yeah, I've heard that before. But the way it's put together, that's what makes this different. That's what makes this, because you're, you're, you're not a business owner standing on your rooftop shouting at the world at large about how awesome you are. You are building a commercial relationship with ideal customers in a way that the ideal customer appreciates. Because it's bringing value to the customer. Like I said, good marketing brings value to the customer and to the business.
Yep. And if people listening, if you don't get anything from what we just said, please get this. This way of thinking is what gets you farther ahead than anything else. Thinking from the customer's perspective, that what the customer is experiencing. If you just optimize that in your business processes, you would have created a machine on one side of the equation that would be a force to be reckoned with. People would love talking about the experience they had with your business. And they'd be like, my gosh, that was amazing.
Right. And, and they'll start to be more open when you're communicating with them after the fact. The sales messages stop being sales messages and start being valuable information.
That telecommunications example I used to talk about, we followed through with them. They accepted our recommendations. It took us about a year to put the plan together. But for four straight years on a two billion dollar base of business, we were generating twenty percent revenue growth.
That's amazing. For for two billion dollars, twenty percent revenue growth is two hundred million dollars.
Year over year for four straight years.
That's amazing. The four straight years, that's eight hundred million dollars in extra generated revenue. I'm a little confused with Matt.
Right. And
we ended up, I mean, it was an interesting conversation, sitting down with the chief marketing officer and explaining that they needed to spend less money.
Because they were they were kind of marketing to everyone.
Yeah.
And we're like, you don't want to market to everyone.
Eighty percent of your revenue is being generated by twenty percent of your customers.
We need to market to that twenty percent. The other
eighty percent. All the marketing in the world is not going to change somebody's need state.
They don't need what you're offering. I mean, you're just swimming upstream.
But that twenty percent who are heavy users, who are heavy category users, they really care about what you're doing. They really care about what you're offering and they really care about the solutions you're providing.
They're much more likely to continue to spend that money with you. It's another old direct marketing concept called RFM.
Recency frequency monetary, the customer who bought for buys from you most frequently, who bought from you most recently and who spent the most money with you is the customer most likely to buy from you again.
Yep. Most, a lot of times, actually, that's probably most of the market. We see when, I don't know if you've read the book, Emeat or not. In that book, there's a pretty staggering statistics, but ninety six percent of businesses are failing within the first ten years. It's a pretty bad, bad number. And
Coordinating that number with what people are doing, I've asked this questions multiple times on my podcast, before and after the podcast. People can't describe to me their ideal customer. They have spent way too much time, money and effort into targeting the unideal customer that they forget about the ideal customer and their focus is dispersed into
Exactly.
Not effective marketing strategies, which is crazy.
And that's what they've been taught. It sucks. It sucks, but it is the truth.
It is completely true and I see it all the time and it's, you know, the, the,
it's hard, you know, David Ogilvie, old ad agency guy, one of his famous quotes is the essence of strategy is sacrifice.
Yep.
Right? You, you just, you have to stop trying to be everything for everyone. Because when you are everything for everyone, you are nothing for no one.
No one. That's awesome. You didn't correct me when I, when I told you it's 200 million, $2 billion. The, the math was 400 million for 20%. And that for years is 1.6 billion dollars.
That's right. It was a big program. It was a very successful program.
That's amazing.
Imagine having 3% retention on that, on the increase of that for the rest of your life.
Right. And I've, I've taken these ideas. I've, I've tested them with automotive manufacturers, with credit card folks, with, you know, banking and it works across lots of different sectors. And it's, I mean, we did an analysis of Bank of America's customer base and showed them that 120% of their profit was being generated by 10% of their customers.
It's like, you know, free checking is not a good idea.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun and we'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
Page updated November 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
