How do I avoid losing a $450M opportunity by building what people want to buy?

Sometimes as business leaders we have to learn lessons the hard way.

Not because we are incapable of learning them through simpler means, but because we lock into a singular worldview that beckons us onward. 

Take your product or service for instance. You built your business around an idea that you believe will serve a powerful purpose that provides your customers with immense value, but what if they’d prefer an alternative? 

Do you ignore them and keep building what you want to build? 

Or do you evolve your original idea to meet them where they see the value? 

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah share their experiences in learning one of the toughest lessons the business world has to offer – the art of building what people want to buy. Discover how to pinpoint your clients' pain points, what they value, and how to adapt your approach to meet their desires—even if it means pivoting from your original plan.

Join us to learn why this lesson is vital for every leader and how mastering it can bring immense opportunity!

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. If you've been struggling with traction or sales, then you're going to want to listen to this episode where Micah and I learned the value of building what people want to buy.

0:00:27 - (Micah): Yeah. Instead of building what we want to build and ignoring what people want to buy, because we have definitely never. Wait, no, we did do that.

0:00:37 - (Alane): Yes, we've done that multiple times.

0:00:39 - (Micah): Multiple times, definitely.

0:00:41 - (Alane): And, you know, it's a balance because you started, you know, we started our company for a reason. This is what we wanted to do. Or we built a software product because this is what we wanted to build. And then you can either fight what people keep telling you and keep building what you want to build, or build what people want to buy and change and evolve your original idea to meet them where they see value.

0:01:06 - (Micah): It's so hard, though. I mean, I get it. We've gone through this like you've said, you have this idea, you want to build that. You're like, this is going to make me a million dollars. You start telling people about it, then they start asking questions, and then you fight them like, oh, well, you don't actually need this. You don't need what you're asking about. You really need what I built. But when that keeps happening over and over again.

0:01:31 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah. So we're fighting yourself.

0:01:34 - (Micah): Yes, you're fighting yourself. You're fighting the clients. You're making fewer sales, you've got less.

0:01:40 - (Alane): Traction happening, and it's defeating, you know, at the end of the day, when you're not selling something that you built, whether it's a service or a software, it defeats you in the end because it's frustrating for you. And if you have a team of people, they're feeling defeated, too, because they're not able to make sales or keep clients on long term.

0:01:59 - (Micah): Yeah, client satisfaction just goes down the crapper.

0:02:03 - (Alane): They'll find another company that does what they want to do or built what they want to have to use.

0:02:09 - (Micah): Yeah. We've got a couple of great stories in this episode, specifically on learning this lesson multiple times. The first one started years and years ago, but I remember looking, I think it was like the Marriotts website in Hawaii or something.

0:02:28 - (Alane): Were you planning a vacation or were you just skimming?

0:02:31 - (Micah): I'm pretty sure I was planning a vacation.

0:02:33 - (Alane): Okay, good.

0:02:34 - (Micah): I ended up in Maui, but we're not gonna talk about that in this interview or in this conversation. But I was looking at their website, and they had essentially what was like. You could see people enter a contest for a free stay. And so while I'm on their website, these little things are popping up, saying, like, oh, you know, michael just entered to win, and Betty just entered to win a free stay. And so, of course I clicked on it, because who doesn't want a free stay?

0:03:06 - (Micah): And it was this very simple, like, giveaway entry form. Entry form, yeah, super simple. And I looked at that and went, you know what? I could build a tool that will help people create things like this. And it's all based on social media, right? Theirs. But then it evolved from that idea. It started with social media on that example, and then I went, you know what's even better than social media? This was way back when social media was just starting to get really popular.

0:03:39 - (Micah): So what's better than social media? Sales leads. Because what's social media for? You go on social media, you get fans or followers, and then that leads to sales leads. So let's just skip the whole social media piece and just create sales leads. So we built a contest and giveaway builder, and it worked. It worked really well. It generated tons of sales leads. But what was happening is we'd end up, like, always be against this one company called Wildfire. So we were, like, talking to univision, and it was us.

0:04:13 - (Micah): Wildfire and us.

0:04:15 - (Alane): Yeah. These huge deals, it would be down to them and us.

0:04:19 - (Micah): Yep, yep. We'd make it to the end, but we'd always lose. We never won one single big deal. We had a bunch of smaller ones. We were able to convince some smaller companies to work with us and some mid sized companies. Actually, there was one company that was a travel company that we generated 30,000 leads for in a single giveaway, which was really cool. It overwhelmed their sales team, but it still worked. And that was enough for us to, I think maybe specifically me to go, oh, yeah, this is totally it.

0:04:55 - (Micah): But what was happening was the reason that we lost all these other big deals was because we were going after sales leads. But this paradigm shift was happening. So this was social media coming up, and everybody was hiring social media managers. And who was in charge of deciding whether they should do contests and giveaways on social media? Social media managers and directors of social media and brand new cmos that are coming into places that are being hired to get fans and followers.

0:05:27 - (Alane): Yeah. To grow their Facebook likes.

0:05:28 - (Micah): Absolutely. And I looked at that how many times do we have conversations, Alane, where I was like, this is so dumb. What are they doing?

0:05:35 - (Alane): They get nothing.

0:05:36 - (Micah): What are they paying for? Yeah. And just being so frustrated. We'd have these internal conversations, and then. Whereas now it sounds so stupid when we say it, because it's like we were selling this product to social media managers and their bosses and then saying to them, but you can get tons.

0:05:53 - (Alane): Of sales leads, and those two things don't go together. Marketing cares about marketing. Sales cares about sales. And if marketing's the decision maker, we waited too long.

0:06:05 - (Micah): We waited too long. And so constantly we were up against, like, well, that's sales, and that's the reason we got smaller businesses, I think. Because sales and marketing could be, like, one person making a decision. Okay, cool.

0:06:16 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:06:16 - (Micah): You know, but that didn't help us move the needle very much. All right, so, long story short, I don't even remember how long we. This was a year or so that.

0:06:25 - (Alane): We fought that battle. That we fought this battle probably about a year.

0:06:28 - (Micah): Yeah. And, you know, we were motivated by the fact that we'd get in the top two, and then we were so dismayed that we'd always lose. And then I remember there was kind of this, I don't know, hitting. It wasn't hitting rock bottom, but it was, like, icing on the cake for, like, holy crap. All right, we've got to check ourselves here. I remember. I think it was, like, google News or something that came up.

0:06:57 - (Micah): And wildfire, the company that we'd always end up in the top two with, ended up selling to Google for $450 million. That's $450 million that we didn't sell for because we lost all those deals consecutively.

0:07:12 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:07:13 - (Micah): And so, yeah, it was after that point, I think you and I sat down and we actually made a bullet list of five tenants that we would run the business by. A number one was build what people.

0:07:26 - (Alane): Want to buy, and that one is a continual reminder of doing that. But it's harder than it sounds. Right? Like, it sounds so simple to build what people want to buy, and it has to be an accumulation of hearing it over and over again and not just what one person says. If one person would have said, you know what? You should really incorporate Facebook likes. Cause that's what I care about, then it wouldn't have been so impactful. But the fact that we heard it over and over and over again is when we should have made a change.

0:07:59 - (Alane): And, you know, Michael, I was thinking about something so small that we didn't realize people cared about. Was when we had the map feature in the dashboard and when people would enter into the contest, it showed a map of where they were located. A little pin would drop and it was so fun to watch. Well, keeping up with that API and everything ended up being expensive, and we just thought, well, it doesn't add any value.

0:08:25 - (Micah): Yeah. In fact, I think we heard it multiple times from clients that were using it. A lot of auto dealerships we ended up getting using it, this platform. And then, like, I think again, remember, like, I remember I wasn't listening. Like, you would talk to people, they would, multiple people would say, what if there was a map? And then you would share that with me and I'm like, a map? That's stupid. Like, that doesn't contribute anything.

0:08:55 - (Alane): But they loved it, and it was a wow factor whenever we would demo it to prospects. Oh man, that is so cool. Did it change anything for them? Nope, but they valued it because they could see it was really a visualization of people entering.

0:09:12 - (Micah): Yes. Yeah. Once you convinced me to finally add the map, we sold multiple accounts just.

0:09:20 - (Alane): On that one feature. And it seemed so ridiculous at the time, but it showed really well. People loved it. We even took it out at one point because the API was complicated and people were devastated.

0:09:32 - (Micah): Yes.

0:09:32 - (Alane): So we put it back in and we just thought, well, if this is something that people value, then we'll continue to put it in there.

0:09:39 - (Micah): I mean, imagine if we would have actually had the map and then generated likes and followers.

0:09:46 - (Alane): We would have exploded. Wouldn't have been so difficult. But things like this happen with services too. Like we've been giving examples of situations that are product based because we had built software, but with services too. One of the things is advertising. When we had a social media agency, we were so focused on content that we weren't listening in the beginning because that's a different service, right. Doing ads and being an ad expert is a different service from writing content.

0:10:19 - (Alane): And I remember going in and be like, well, but it's free. You're already paying us to do the content. And we could post about your specials and do all this. And they're like, okay. And then one day I said, you know what, we're just going to figure it out and I'm gonna sell it and I'm gonna make up a number. And we just, that's, that became a third of our business was selling advertising, because that is what clients in that space wanted to purchase. They understand ads and ad space.

0:10:47 - (Alane): Oh, I can put my deal in front of somebody. It doesn't matter if I only have 20 Facebook ads, we can target them.

0:10:55 - (Micah): So I think all of this comes down to listening.

0:11:00 - (Alane): It does.

0:11:01 - (Micah): Hearing what prospects are saying multiple times. If you're on a sales call and you keep getting asked the same question, hey, can it do, can you, do, you know, does it do, do you do things like that? Are clear indicators that they're looking for a solution that you haven't presented right away.

0:11:22 - (Alane): Yeah. And this becomes harder as you become a manager of a team because you might not be in those client conversations. And so, so then you have to listen to your team and make sure they're asking those questions and they're giving that feedback, or you're occasionally sitting in on client calls because you might be big enough to where you've got a team of 20 doing client services and you're not in those conversations.

0:11:47 - (Alane): And so making sure you do hear it. And a lot of times the account managers have ideas on services that could be added.

0:11:54 - (Micah): I think you're bringing up a really good point here, which is you got to listen through the entire customer journey. Like, you're going to hear it in the prospecting, you're going to hear it in the onboarding, you're going to hear it in the account management, and you're probably going to hear it in cancellations.

0:12:11 - (Alane): Yeah. You didn't do x, so I'm going with company.

0:12:15 - (Micah): Yep, yep, exactly. So all great areas to listen, listen for repeat indicators that something should happen. Now, one of the things that you and I, maybe me, more than you have struggled with, is when we do listen, we do hear, okay, this is what people want to buy, but then we have to acknowledge, like, that's completely different than what we set out to build. That's a tough pill to swallow. When you set out to build something, maybe you feel like it's your baby.

0:12:52 - (Micah): And all of a sudden people are like, I don't want your baby. Yeah, I want this other baby over here. If we're gonna keep up with this baby analogy.

0:13:04 - (Alane): I mean, it's tough. Like, we all have egos, whether we wanna admit it or not, and also a desire to do the work.

0:13:10 - (Micah): Yeah, I mean, that's. I think that's one of the biggest things. If you're a service provider and you've decided this is the type of service that I'm going to offer, and then people are like, that's cool, but I'd much rather have this variation of it. You have to accept that if you want to scale, grow, or generate revenue, you might have to change your service, and that might be something you didn't initially plan to offer as a service, or it might be a variation of your service, which means you have to accept.

0:13:39 - (Micah): Is that something you really want to do?

0:13:42 - (Alane): And you don't have to be the one to do it. Hiring team members that have the expertise so you don't have to is the most rewarding thing that we've done.

0:13:55 - (Micah): We have an episode on that, yes.

0:13:58 - (Alane): And I mean, you do get to a point where, okay, you know, you do need to have a few different maybe offerings so that because a client doesn't want to have to go to 50 places, they would like to have fewer vendors and so. But as a business owner, we don't have to like everything that we do. Yeah, but we can have team members that love that and that we can make money off of.

0:14:22 - (Micah): I mean, I think a great example is our previous agency. We started with social media management. We were writing content, we added ads. Well, then we started hearing and listening to what people were saying about reputation. Oh, I got these crappy reviews, and it's a competitor. How do I get these off? Well, people started asking us that so many times that we ended up offering that as a service.

0:14:46 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:14:47 - (Micah): And so that helped. But I look back on that and it was by that stage we had grown enough, to your point. But it's like, there's no way that, you know, I could have been an expert in writing content, reputation, and running ads. We had experts in all of those things, which meant when we listened to what people want to buy, we could, or, you know, we added the experts as we listened, but we didn't have to all be experts in everything, and we didn't have to like it all. I didn't really like reputation management at all.

0:15:21 - (Micah): Like, it was frustrating. That's why I tried to build software to also solve some of those problems, which ended up being pretty cool. Yeah, but we listened to what people wanted to buy about reputation. We offered services about reputation management, and then we knew how we could leverage software to improve that rather than starting off from scratch building software and then finding out people didn't want to buy it in the way that we bought it.

0:15:49 - (Alane): Yeah. And even in this business.

0:15:50 - (Micah): Or built it.

0:15:51 - (Alane): Yeah, even in this business. Now with the services, when we started this company, we weren't really sure what we were going to sell. We named it BGbO co for biggest goal, biggest obstacle, because we were so broad and we weren't really sure, other than operations, that we could help and consult on and through time, we've really evolved that to okay project management workflows and processes. And we then added, okay, outside of your project management system, how does that work with all your other software platforms? And so we've built, yeah, so, you know, automate integrate.

0:16:31 - (Alane): And so then we added on top of that, the services to go in and actually implement automation and integrate the software platforms together. And that was over time. Us hearing that this was valuable to clients that they didn't, they're not just operating in their one project management system. They've got multiple software. They're feeling the pain points of going in between systems. And so we decided, hey, what if we added this to our service offering?

0:16:58 - (Micah): I think the pain points that you bring up are a really good point because that's one thing to, I didn't mention it earlier, but that is definitely one thing to listen for if you're hearing the same pain points over and over, which we did. I got my team using Asana. I have no idea. Like, we're clearly not using it. Right. We have no idea how to use it. Everybody's using it differently. We're not using all the features.

0:17:23 - (Micah): We could hear the same thing with ClickUp. We could hear the same thing with Monday. I don't know how to integrate it. I don't know how to automate it. I don't know how to train my team. I don't know how to structure. All of these pain points were consistent across. So that allowed us to really focus in, like you're saying, on what we.

0:17:40 - (Alane): Do and expanding which platforms we're experts in. At first, we were very asana because we built our previous company on Asana, and then ClickUp started to get a little bit bigger, and then Monday's marketing just exploded. And so even if we weren't excited and originally about adding additional platforms over time because we heard these pain points, I'm in Monday, I'm using Monday. Okay, well, we've heard this now multiple times. We're going to become experts in Monday.

0:18:12 - (Alane): And so it's still project management, and so it still fits in our service offering of what we want to do. The platform isn't as important. We're still getting to do what we want to do, which is help companies utilize project management systems and automate, definitely.

0:18:28 - (Micah): And I think, you know, in addition to that, it also helped us refine when we identified that it was project management systems, we didn't add every single project management system out there under the sun that we could do. Yeah, we focused on and we still focus on Asana, ClickUp and Monday. There's like, there's teamwork, there's a whole bunch of other ones that just don't have the traction, they don't have the base, they don't have even the functionality, functionality that will allow us to provide as much value as those three. So first it allowed us to expand and then it also allowed us to narrow down.

0:19:06 - (Alane): Yeah, these are the three that we like working in that we believe are going to be the best for what you're doing. And that doesn't mean there's other companies that are experts in the other ones. Cause they believe in those companies.

0:19:17 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the same thing with CRM tools. When we integrate or we help clients manage the CRM side of things on the sales side to get to project management. Right, it's click or not ClickUp. All I want to do is say ClickUp. It's HubSpot, pipe, drive and close. Yep, those are all super capable systems. They've got enough traction across the board. But we don't have to support twelve or 15 different systems and we don't have to only do Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce.

0:19:53 - (Alane): So if you're struggling with expanding, growing traction, just remember, build what people want to buy, listen to your customers. Where's the value? Where are their pain points? And see where you fit in. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:20:16 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:20:21 - (Alane): Bye for now.