Episode #2 - Amir Bazrafshan on being clear about what you want your customers to know

Show Notes

On this episode, I talk to Amir Bazrafshan,  Founder at ApricotBox and owner of Apricot Video + Marketing.

Key Points

1. Be clear about what you want your customers to know

2. Seek closure, a decision one way or another

3. "Market, message, media" from Dan Kennedy

Show Notes

Books Recommended:
Dan Kennedys Magnetic Marketing
Zig Ziglars Secrets of Closing the Sale

Contact Details

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amir-bazrafshan-a0843212/

https://twitter.com/Apricot_Amir

https://apricotbox.co.uk/

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Transcription

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, customers, sales, processes, apricot, principles, business, book, call, idea, message, big, buy, marketing, thinking, helps, box, amir, linkedin, finding

SPEAKERS Conor McCarthy, Amir Bazrafshan

Conor McCarthy  00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the first 10 podcast where I interview Business Builders on their first 10 customers who they were had they found them had they talk to them and what effect they had on their business so that you can learn what worked and what didn't. My guest today is my good friend Amir positive Shan I've known Amir now for just over four years, we met our students on alt MBA. And, and yeah, we've been in constant contact since he's he's definitely one of my cognitive siblings. As they say, This conversation is great, because Amir does some pretty cool stuff. He started his own video marketing agency called apricot. And off the back of that he's launching Other ventures, one of which is called apricot box, which helps you build your social media presence, your social media brand through videos, pretty cool stuff. And definitely check out the show notes for links to all of his work. It's a great conversation. Amir is Is it true kind of 360 degree thinker when it comes to the first 10 customers and to building businesses and he's someone I often go to for advice when I'm launching anything. One of the things he said on this podcast, which I think is worth pointing out, is that the most important thing you can bring to a conversation is curiosity. And I think that's a great thing to have in your head as we go through this conversation. And we talk about books, we talk about some kind of heroes of sales and marketing that we have. And all in all, it's a great conversation, and I really hope you enjoy it. And if you enjoy this, please do get in touch. First 10 podcast.com that's 10 with a one zero, or on Twitter at the first 10 pot. Enjoy the show. Hey there first 10 podcast listeners. Welcome Welcome. I'm here today with my good friend Amir Bazar. SHAN. Amir, let's get straight into your site jam. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your business story so far on what you're working on right now? 

Amir Bazrafshan  01:45

Yeah, thanks, Connor. So I have worked on my own business for about eight or nine years. It's a video marketing agency. And in the last couple of months, I launched something which is sort of related to it sort of like a productized version of something that we offered as an agency. And what that new thing is, we're calling it apricot box, the agency's called apricot. This is called apricot box. It's a subscription, where we convert blog posts into video for social media on a monthly basis. So customers just have to email us links to the blogs that they want turning into videos, and we turn them into little animated videos, really engaging little things that you post on social media, and they help to build your brand, basically, by helping you to stand out, increasing engagement following and over time, increasing traffic back to your website. So that's what I'm busy working on at the minute.

Conor McCarthy  02:50

Cool. This podcast is all about your first 10 customers. So you can pick your first date, the original apricot company, or you can talk more about apricot bucks. And yeah, I'd love to know more about how you approached finding your first 10 customers? Yeah,

Amir Bazrafshan  03:08

well, I'll stick to apricot box, because it's something that's fresh in my mind. And you know, it's something I'm working on, day in, day out. And so, at the very beginning, in terms of finding the first 10 customers, I think, for me, it's all about coming back to that very fundamental principle of marketing, which is like market message media, and identifying your who first and foremost and being very, very clear on who is most likely to buy from you, who you who you are, and your product, best situated to help because you're going to have most clout with them, you're going to have more leverage with them than with anybody else. And because at the beginning, startup founders, you know, tend not to have too much money. And also even if you do, you don't want to be like spending loads and loads and loads, because at the beginning, you don't really know what you're doing. So it's a massive, massive process of ation and discovery. And the first few customers have got very hot box, or literally cold calls. calling people that fit the profile of the people that we thought we could help and introducing them to the product, giving them a free trial. And then once we're happy making them an offer. And the benefit of I know it's not very cool thing to do making cold calls. And in some areas. If you've got an app, for example, you know, maybe it might not be the best way to do it. But for where it's applicable. I think cold calling is a fantastic approach, because you can test your messages very, very rapidly with handpicked people from your market, you know, in three, six months time, there's gonna be very little outreach that we do. But at the very core of the marketing that we're doing in three to six months time, which is going to be scalable, so ads, landing pages, you know, things like that. And the very core of that those messages are things that have been validated on the phone. And on cold email, outreach on LinkedIn, is a great place to validate those messages. And make sure that before you scale, and do put money behind your marketing, you know, at least with some certainty, that it's going to be effective.

Conor McCarthy  05:55

Hmm. That's fascinating. Yeah. So that's, I mean, you're highlighting a couple of things that are that are suppose our core principles of this podcast, and, you know, picking up the phone doing the cold calling early on, is, yeah, this is part of the hard work of finding those customers. So when you, when you sat down with a prop box, you kind of went okay, I've got the idea in my head. Did you like have some kind of a script or a message? Or did you just go right, first person that springs to mind, I'm just gonna pick up the phone and start talking to them.

Amir Bazrafshan  06:27

Yeah, so you know, I needed to have because on the phone, or any like market, like Steve Jobs says, you know, we have so little time to make an impact on people, we have to be very, very, very clear about what we want them to know about us. So in order to know that, you have to have a strategy, you need to know how you want to be positioned, which basically means how you want to be regarded by your target market, how did they want to think of you perceive what you can do for them, if you're very, very clear on that, and sort of boil that down into something that's not going to take very long to deliver. So again, it's like that market message media match. So you starting with the who, and then your message is sort of the what. And it's, you know, using language terminology, and really framing things in a way that you're selling what people want to buy. And that's going to help you to, to have more engagement on those initial calls. And obviously, that is just the foundation for success anyway. But you sort of figuring out those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and most of the time at the very beginning, you're probably not going to get it quite right. But that's the beauty of picking up the phone, is because you can have a phone call with somebody and talk about what you do. And they're not that interested. So you say right, okay, that call the call before didn't go well. So why don't we try this, and then you try it, and you get more engagement. And you can sort of build, you know, build on that.

Conor McCarthy  08:15

Hmm. And, as I say, I love the idea. Maybe because nowadays, it's it feels so old school of literally picking up the phone, would you ever do this? In another way? Would you ever do it through LinkedIn, email, etc?

Amir Bazrafshan  08:30

Yeah, and I have, and, and, and ads as well. And again, it's all too for me anyway, experiment with that market message match. So in the, in the adverts, you know, sort of doing a B split testing is this that came after the phone calls and emails, by the way, just because, you know, I don't want to waste you know, several hundred pounds on ads. If I don't have any sort of idea at all, you know, I want to have at least some, some some idea. An email as well. Yeah, absolutely. There's a different different things to focus on with email, because you've got to get the subject, right. People don't know who you are. And LinkedIn. Again, you know, you got to get that initial message right? Out of those three from sort of like outreach, phone, email, and LinkedIn. So we're working on working with those sort of tools. The last few months, I've really come to understand that when you're doing outreach and people don't realise who you are, credibility is such an important thing. Because you've got to build credibility really quickly, because people are busy. And be because people because they don't know who on earth you are. And you could be scammer. You could be time waster. And I find that on the phone and LinkedIn. In actually, you can sort of hack credibility fairly, fairly quickly. And on the phone by how you talk by how well spoken you are by how knowledgeable you come across. That's a good credibility builder, how polite, obviously, you are on phone, things like that. And then LinkedIn, I've got a premium account on LinkedIn, I've got, you know, fairly active account where post so people can look. And they can see that actually, I'm a legitimate person. I'm not going to scam them. So yeah, these things, these things at the very, very beginning of his credibility is important for the whole. However, the way that you go about building credibility, obviously, when we do content that's going to be done, credibility is going to be built in in a different way. That if you want to sort of get over that first hurdle, and you can be doing outreach, that's something to really think about.

Conor McCarthy  10:56

I love that idea. Yeah, I mean, about those, those, those take those first steps to figure out better what you have before spending any money, I guess. And, and when you say, like cold calls, could literally be to total strangers, or there are a couple of go to people, not that you would test your your messaging or approach on them. But like, you know, friends of yours, who were always in the market for the services that I put up box offers, would you call them up to kind of go? I've got one for you. What do you think of this?

Amir Bazrafshan  11:27

Yeah, so I guess one of the advantages of having a video marketing agency and then offering a prototype video, like service, is we've got past customers that we've been able to call and informed with launch to say, this is what I'm thinking doing. Like, what do you what do you think? And I can have a, we actually signed up somebody on just on that basis. And yes, there are people that were fortunate enough to have good relationships with it within within the past, that we can say, you know, can we spend 1520 minutes on the phone, asking you some questions? How does this kind of Proposition sound to you? What what value would you get? How would that help you? In regards of what you struggle with? How is that going to make your life easier, and just get it you know, I love that people are very, very honest. And I love that. And if people are saying to me, this is the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. I really love that. Because I can I can use it, I'd much rather have that brutal honesty. And I would encourage all like founders, people that getting things off the ground, to not love your idea to not love the product, but to love your customer, and to love the idea of serving them. And in many ways you sort of have to put your your ego to one side, it's not about having thick skin. I think it's just about hitting pause on your ego and not taking things personally. And really understanding that when people are honest with you, it's gold. And it's stuff that you can use to build something better that is going to serve them.

Conor McCarthy  13:11

I love that I think there's such a big mindset shift that needs to happen before going out and seeking those first 10 customers. And I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah, like putting your ego to one side, I think is really important. Because you want some kind of closure from your, from your calls from your discussions with people, whether that's, hey, this is great. Let's, you know, let's see some more or else it's No, definitely not. And you want to go down one road and not be standing at a fork at the end of the call. In any case. And so, so so apricot box, I mean, you're kind of pitching to a similar audience to apricot. And have you ever or would you ever try to cold call or pitch something to an industry? You don't know anything about?

Amir Bazrafshan  14:01

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I would. The the audience is similar, but not exactly the same. Although we have done some experiments, just in the last week or so, with because we've always dealt with mostly small to medium sized businesses. In the last week or so we've been experimenting with much, much bigger businesses, just to see like what kind of leverage in interest we're getting from from there. But if if I thought that there was potential value, I wouldn't be afraid of kind of cold calling anybody. I think if you're going to do that, and you sort of need to go into it. with curiosity being like, the biggest thing, you know, the biggest thing you take into a course should be curiosity. I think sort of helps you to not get anxious or worried about calling somebody you don't know. And, and the onus is almost on sort of a co creation dynamic, because you're not looking to sell at people and never think that that's a good thing to do. Actually, with the first phone call, I think of them as top of the funnel conversations, where is at the top of the top of the funnel, content 10 tends to be like in b2b, especially education based. So whenever I've done like cold calling in the past, I've always tried, even if people aren't interested to deliver some kind of value, or at least offer some kind of value with no strings attached to that to that person that, again, helps, I think with the dynamic of a call.

Conor McCarthy  15:55

Yeah, for sure. If you can, if you can walk in with something in your hand, regardless where the call goes, that you can say here, this is this will make your life easier. In some ways. That's a big plus, what might that look like? Is that? Yeah, what what would be the value of that?

Amir Bazrafshan  16:09

So in the past, when I've done it with my agency, what we used to do was actually do an analysis of their, their video, their current video work for their YouTube channel, and say, you know, I'd say I've got some, you know, interesting stats, I've just done a quick analysis, would you like me to go through them or email them to you. And that was often a good conversation starter. If you're leaving people with useful, actionable insights, with apricot box, what we're doing is offering people a free video. It's no strings attached. And actually, it helps us even if that person never talks to us, again, after we've delivered it, it helps us because, again, one of the key things at the start of, you know, getting something off the ground, are your processes. So our production processes are very different, making videos for April box, and they are for the agency, because it's more scalable, we have to bring time and speed into into the into the mix. So we have to be very, very clear on what our process is. And every single video that we make, helps us to understand and optimise the process, really laying that foundation for when we form the scale. Because scaling is never just about sales. And I think that sometimes there's that misunderstanding or misconception of what scaling means. While you do want to have more sales, you also need the right processes and the right people in place. Otherwise, it'll be like jumping on a trampoline that's got, you know, no nuts and bolts, and you'll just go straight through the bottom, you want to make sure that trampoline is really really robust if you want to be jumping super, super high, and it ended up to take that falls. And it's the same if you've got a flood of new customers coming in, you want to keep that service really elegant, you want to be fulfilling your promises to people. So you have to make sure that the right processes are in place and the right people are in place to run those processes.

Conor McCarthy  18:19

Yeah, I love that. And it probably applies what as well, when someone does come on board that everything just seems well done for you that they're not kind of nothing's missing, they're not wondering what's happening. Next, you've got your process there, it serves them as much as the serves you.

Amir Bazrafshan  18:33

Exactly. So that's, that's one of the benefits, or one of the ways to, to really, you know, use the first 10 customers is to focus on what those processes are, and to have as many chances as you can to run through those processes, making sure that they're doing, you know, the inputs are expected. And the outputs are what you want and what the customer wants.

Conor McCarthy  18:55

Love that. Yeah. And I have a question that I don't think I'll ask my guests, but I'll ask you, because I know you are so such a big reader, and you'd love to read about persuasion and sales. And as it applies to kind of sales and marketing. Are there any numbers, nuggets of wisdom that you would impart about the art of persuasion or just about sales in general? And the interplay of those?

Amir Bazrafshan  19:23

Yeah, I think the big thing about sales is that it's not the four letter word that people equate to it. Sales has got a really bad rep over the years. Because perhaps because of people not doing it very well. And I don't think that's what Well, that's not what good sales is. So at the start, when you're getting something off the ground, you have to be good at sales know what, what where you'd go about it. See it, there's It makes sense to embrace the fact that sales is important. It's okay to set you know, to make sales, and to embrace the fact that you need to get some salesmanship into what you're doing. And it doesn't that does not mean being tricky. It does not mean thinking like a con man. It just means being deliberate in sale in making wanting to make the sale. And if you can be deliberate in how you go about your sales process is knowing that it's okay to do that, that you're selling something that's going to add value, then it should help to lower any blockages to doing that, because I think that first hurdle is one in my experience, a lot of people fall out feeling comfortable doing. But if you do it the right way, then it's just, you know, wins for everybody.

Conor McCarthy  20:58

Yeah, I love that. And are there any resources books or videos or articles that you would recommend to? Just as a step one on the on the road to sales?

Amir Bazrafshan  21:12

Yeah. So I like Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy has a book called magnetic marketing, talks about market message media match. There is a book, six secrets secrets of closing the sale. And I really like. So the old school copywriters, so like caples, tested advertising methods, which is a very good book, very, very good book, and breakthrough advertising, by Eugene Schwartz. They're all really good. But obviously, as with any book, you know, the value isn't in just sort of buying them and having them on your desk, the value is in finding principles, and putting them to work. So absolutely invest in those books. But fine things apply to you use the principles behind their ideas, and go all out in applying them.

Conor McCarthy  22:19

I couldn't agree more, I think it's so important is it, I think that people might hear this and go and buy the box or the mic, go on YouTube. And you'll find them all, and they'll tear through the box. And I've read one or two of those. And they are they're fascinating. They're brilliant. And I say this as much for myself as for anyone else. translating that into, into your kind of mindset of how you go about, let's say your cold calls, is the tricky part. Is there anything that you've taken from a book, and, and applied knowingly, if that makes sense? Like a concept you read and you went? That's fascinating. I'm going to try and use that. And then on the next call, you did something different?

Amir Bazrafshan  23:00

Yeah, so those tactical things, I think, very rarely come from, from books. In a sense, it's the sort of thing you have to figure out yourself, but based on principles, and it's for me, the real gold is understanding fundamental principles, and then apply and then and then sort of evolving those up into your particular area. So the big principles for me that I like swear by. So what people want to buy, which sounds painfully obvious, but you've got to be deliberate about that. And that comes down to selling things, something that's already in demand, framing something that you've got to align with a struggle, where, you know, Western needs benefit. That's so what people want to buy market message media, which is Dan Kennedy, I learned that from Dan Kennedy. And that is just so so so important to making sure that your marketing sales are effective. So you want to define and align market who your message, the wall, and the media, which is a channel that you reach your your customers on. And then finally, thinking about your marketing as a process of generating and earning attention, building trust, and inspiring action to buy. And that last one is a big one. And that's where the systems come in. So can you develop a system for generating sustainable attention? How are you going to build trust with the people that you've got their attention? And then how are you going to inspire them to buy so they're the principles that I've literally got stuck up on my desk right now. In front of me now, and whenever I'm doing something, I'll come back to those principles. And just be like, okay, am I am I following these? Because I think any successful business, those principles, whether people know it or not are at the centre of them.

Conor McCarthy  25:19

Hmm, I love those they are that they sound like golden, golden principles, and especially the, you know, attention trust. And, and, and inciting action. And that probably goes back to the kind of helping people make a decision one way or another. Because they might they might people like to be polite, I guess. And they might love what you do and be really into it. But they're, it's just not right for them now, or maybe not right for them at all. Yeah, but they might not want to say that to your face. So the action could be a no. But as long as it's getting that clear now from people? Yes. In that case. So what would you say to someone who is just starting out? They have zero customers, they have an idea. And they may have built some kind of an MVP, something basic, even a landing page, or they may not? And what would you say to them heading into their first 10 customer conversations,

Amir Bazrafshan  26:18

get your first customer as quickly as possible, and just go all out to get it, get it over the line, you have to validate if you don't have any customers, you don't have a validated business. And there's a there's a world of difference between being in a room of people pitching an idea for business and they go, Oh, that's a really good idea, to getting them to give you money. There's a world of difference between that and you have to bridge that gap. And you have to go out and you know, get people to transact with you in exchange for what it is that you are that you're selling. Because once you do that, that is the first step on optimising your offering up demising your message, you know, making sure that you're delivering what people want to buy, and making sure that the message fits your market. Without a customer. It's very, you just can't you know, you just can't, you can't do that. You have to validate your your idea and your business as quickly as possible, using whichever channels are appropriate for you know, for you.

Conor McCarthy  27:35

I love that. That's Yeah, that's solid, solid advice. And, okay, we might wrap it up there. Is there anything you want to want to plug on a database before we forget?

Amir Bazrafshan  27:46

And I don't think so. No. Yeah, I think that we've covered everything that's, you know, pretty important. Everything that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about and immersed in over the last few weeks, and hopefully some people will find something useful in there. Yeah, absolutely. I think they will. And I'll include all your contact details in the show notes as well. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for having me.

Conor McCarthy  28:09

Pleasure. And that's a wrap. I really hope you enjoyed this episode, and that there was something in there that was actionable and insightful for your business. Do check out the show notes for more information on what we discussed, as well as ways to contact my guest today. Helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast, please do get in touch at www.first10podcast.com, or on Twitter @TheFirst10Pod.