A Predictable Pipeline, Without the Grind

This one's a bonus, and it's a little different from what you usually get from me, but I noticed a need when I surveyed my subscriber community, so I reached out to my friend Marquel Russell to help.

You first met Marquel, CEO of Strategic Scale Institute, in Part 1 of my Scaling with Grace series. We focused on how the power of grace shifted his personal and organizational leadership over the last few years.

If you missed it, you can check out the two-part article here: Part 1 | Part 2.

I wanted to tap into his genius zone a bit more for you because what I find incredibly valuable is that he intimately knows the pains of operating a business in the grind, and he has experienced the goodness of growing and scaling without the grind.

He said he was “baptized by fire.” 🔥😂

He’s left the grind behind, not only in how he leads in business, but how he operates his businesses. And through his company Strategic Scale Institute, he’s helped over 3,000 business owners scale their businesses, and one of those ways is by helping them create predictable pipelines through automated marketing and sales systems.

So if you have been trying to crack the nut of consistent, high-quality, automated lead generation, this one's for you.

You can watch our entire 1-hour conversation here to juice all the goodness out of it.

Here are the highlights:

Often when business owners say that ads don’t work, the problem is with the offer and the messaging. He compared it to someone who smells bad spraying on cologne to cover it up. You can spend as much as you want on ads, but if the offer underneath isn't clear, none of it lands.

The mistake he sees most often is business owners confusing their offer with their product or service. They're not the same thing. "The offer isn't the product or service," he said. "The offer is the transformation."

Apple's iPod wasn't sold as an MP3 player with gigabytes and USB compatibility, the way every competitor was selling theirs. Steve Jobs sold "1,000 songs in your pocket." 

Domino's didn't sell the best pizza, or organic ingredients, or anything about quality at all. Their offer was "fresh hot pizza in 30 minutes or less, or it's free." That's it.

And an example from one of Marquel’s clients, an owner of an accounting firm. Once they went from saying the offer is accounting and bookkeeping services to saying “We help professional service businesses minimize taxes and maximize profits," lead generation was more effective.

All of these pass what Marquel calls the three-second rule: Can someone look at your website, your bio, or your landing page and know what you do and why they should stay, in three seconds or less? 

While it’s true that you can grow your business through referrals and warm relationships without ever reaching that level of offer clarity, in order to scale with automated systems, clarity matters.

Attention. You have to earn the scroll-stop by becoming magnetic.  Know your ideal client so well that you could write their journal entry for them. People need to see two things before they invest their money: a proven, repeatable process, and demonstrated expertise. Creating content is a highly valuable activity worth prioritizing as a CEO, as people do business with people, not with logos. One hour a week is often all it takes. With a system, content for an entire week can be created in a single sitting. 

Trust. Trust is built through multiple touches. Build trust through multiple channels because in the real world your clients and customers are bouncing around the internet. Someone might meet you doomscrolling Instagram, run into you again on LinkedIn, then see you in a Facebook ad for a workshop. Each one is a touch, and trust is built cumulatively across all of them, not through one channel doing all the work. And remember that people live multi-dimensional lives, so they can encounter your messaging in different environments: at home, in the office, at the pickleball court, or at a networking event.

And when you do Attention and Trust well, you will attract the right clients and customers and Monetize. After all, great marketing makes selling unnecessary.

Leading and scaling a flourishing business requires diligence, but it doesn’t require excessive hard work. During our conversation, I pressed Marquel on a few areas that I believed were important for CEOs who desire to scale with grace through paid advertising, and he delivered in his responses.  

Bottom line is:

But here are the specifics that Marquel shared:

While it’s true that you want to create multiple touches through multiple channels, you don’t need to do everything all at once. Scale by stacking. Pick one channel, run it consistently for 90 days, track it, and then decide whether to keep it or cut it before adding the next layer. 

Bonus tip: Sometimes it makes sense to be strategically absent from platforms, not just present on the ones that fit.

Many business owners have bloated their marketing with every tactic that once worked well, or simply sounded good at the time. His answer is to prune using a simple sequence he calls EAT.

Eliminate what isn't producing. If you've been tracking performance, this is where you use the data. In times when you don’t have precise tracking data, you can still analyze where things are and choose to eliminate them, even if only temporarily as a test.  

Automate tasks that are repetitive and necessary.

Transfer what's left, to your team or to systems, once you've freed up the bandwidth from the first two steps. He was direct about the trap here: sometimes we keep paying people to do things that should have been eliminated entirely, just because that's what they were hired to do years ago.

If you’re nervous at all about your paid advertising spending, start small. Test messaging with a budget as small as $5 a day before scaling anything up.

Marquel pointed to something he had to learn from one of his own mentors: what's your enough number? Have you actually sat down and calculated it?

He was direct about how easy it is to miss this. We're wired to believe more is always the answer: more leads, more followers, more revenue, so business owners often blow past their own stated goals without noticing, and keep grinding away, chasing numbers.

If any part of this hit close to home, I want to hear about it. 

Hit reply and tell me what you're working through, both from a leadership and operational perspective as you’re scaling your business.

Marquel and I are discussing potential ways we can collaborate to help more business owners scale with grace, leveraging both The Grace Effect and Strategic Scale. What you tell us will help shape it.

Coming soon…the final article in our Scaling with Grace series.