S07 E04 – What To Look For In A Changing Market, and The Difference Between a Niche and an Ideal Client with Jessica Mehring

Jessica Mehring 0:00
Put all of your clients on a page and just keep narrowing it down you narrow down by the clients you love to work with narrow down by the clients that you’ve got the best results for narrow down further by the clients that are the easiest for you to work with that pay their invoices on time. Please keep narrowing down the list until you have this very small really listen to him. And then you look at the common thread and what’s the common thread through his businesses?

Jason Resnick 0:36
Welcome to Episode Four of season seven of live in the feast. I’m Jason aka rezzz helping you grow your business by having a conversation with someone who’s been there had success and built the business designed around the life that they want to live. That’s live in the feast. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so that you get notified every time a new episode. drops live in the feast is in your podcast app of choice. And if it’s not, let me know and I’ll get it there. If you’ve heard the show before, leave us a review on iTunes or drop us a comment in breaker or cast box. Today’s co host is Jessica Mehring. A quote from her that I really love is this “Successful marketing and sales enablement. don’t happen on a wish and a prayer to achieve faster customer growth, shorten the sales cycle, and most importantly, build long term customer relationships. You’ve got to reach the right people with the right content, putting conversation before the conversion.” I love this quote because it resonates so much with how I’ve built my successful business. And if it resonates with you, you are going to love this episode. Jessica is a marketing communications expert and the CEO of horizon peak consulting where she helps it and software companies increased enterprise sales with targeted conversion content. In this episode, we dive into the difference between an ideal client and a niche. But also talk about the emotions, the fears of this iterative process and how important personal conversations and pattern recognition is in this whole process. This is a great one who’s Jessica Nice talking about the ideal client.

Hey Feasters, welcome to another episode of living in the feast. I am super excited that Jessica is here with us. Welcome Jessica,

Jessica Mehring 2:47
thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk about this topic today.

Jason Resnick 2:52
Yes, me too. And I think it’s going to just looking around what you talk about all the time. I know where this is going to go. And so I’m super excited for this. But before we get into it a little bit, can you share with us who your ideal client is?

Jessica Mehring 3:11
Yeah, my ideal client. And of course, this has changed many times over the years. But right now, my ideal clients tend to be Director of Marketing at a large and enterprise company. Course, like with all things, there are exceptions to that rule. Sometimes my point of contact as a marketing manager, sometimes the company I’m working with is smaller. But yeah, my ideal client right now, the one that I’m just getting the best results for and working best with is the director of marketing, not even necessarily fortune 500 company but large enterprise company.

Jason Resnick 3:48
So for a lot of the audience here, I think they focus in on small to medium sized businesses, not necessarily enterprise, what attracted you to the enterprise level of clients.

Jessica Mehring 4:00
So it let’s actually talk a little bit about customer versus nature if you don’t mind Sure. Because interestingly I do work with smaller companies as well. And my niche is actually companies that sell it and software solutions to enterprise companies. Okay? And that means that sometimes they are these large companies and sometimes they’re the smaller companies that sell a solution to the big guys. So there is a difference is between me and ideal customer. And you know, you could have different ideal customers within your niche as well. And my already, my brains already going million miles a minute. I like where I want to go with this.

Jason Resnick 4:43
Yeah, so so I totally agree with you. For me, I’ve flocked towards the e commerce realm, like I I’ve been running my business now for close to a decade. I’ve been doing it part time for 17 years. I’ve been doing this a long time, but I love the commerce that whole time. And so e commerce is a big topic and the big broad. Nisha, if you will, but it’s big. And so I’ve sort of settled in on a specific type of client that I work with, well, that I know that I could succeed with and help them grow, and, and so on and so forth. So I’d love to be able to hear your thoughts around that specifically, meaning, how did you come across your ideal client that actually sells to you like a B to B to B? Right. How did you how’d you come across that? How did you figure that out?

Jessica Mehring 5:39
Yeah, and like I said, this has changed many times over the years and I think that your ideal customer should change as you grow as your value changes and grows. This was really full circle for me. I started out in corporate right out of college. I was working for Compaq computer Corporation. told you how long I’ve been doing this. Yeah, and You know, I started out in the corporate world doing content management and working alongside the developers and rewriting product copy and online merchandising content, banner ads, all of that stuff. And I was really immersed in marketing, but in a corporate kind of environment was very comfortable with that, because that’s where I cut my teeth. And when I struck out on my own, I did what I think a lot of people do, at least in the the copywriter space, I’ve seen this a lot, where they’re like, I want to help the little guys. I don’t want to work in corporate anymore. I want to help the small businesses because that’s where all the interesting things are happening. And, you know, they’re so dynamic and they move faster. So I did that. And I tried to focus on the small businesses. And after a couple of years, what I realized is I just was not making the same impact on businesses that I was with corporate and I still kind of had my my toes in the water. Corporate of, you know, large and enterprise technology specifically. And I just I saw that, while they were two very different environments, small business and market enterprise business, two very different environments, they had a lot of the same need. And they had vastly different resources, and vastly different ways of approaching, working with a marketing professional of any kind. And it was just so much harder, really, for me to make the big impact with the small businesses. So I kind of started thinking, maybe I maybe I should kind of start focusing again on on working with the bigger companies and kind of see what that looks like. And so I started taking on more than more of the large companies and again, getting back into that corporate environment in a lot of ways that had changed since I left corporate as a job and just seeing how of what the new environment was and the new the new organizational structures were and the new marketing practices were in that large enterprise space. And it was, it was so interesting to me. And it was so much more dynamic than I remember it being. And again, they had so many more resources that they could put towards marketing and towards content. Specifically, I focus on the content side of the house. And the people were just, they were so into what they were doing, and so excited to be working with somebody like me, it really got me excited about working with large companies all over again. And then they started picking up clients who were smaller, but we’re selling their services, their IT services, or it products and software, to these large enterprise companies. And again, it was just so excited. There’s there’s this just as kind of, I don’t know, I guess passion, maybe maybe the right word that I do. Remember experiencing when I was on the inside? And it was really fun to be a part of that. And of course selling, selling service marketing to large and enterprise customers is such a different proposition. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yes. And because of my background, I was really good at it. I could understand the target the target customer better than most copywriters, content writers could. And so then I was making a bigger impact. And they just they gave me the space to make a bear impact to that make sense?

Jason Resnick 9:38
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s go back to the point at which you realize that you weren’t making as big an impact as you thought you could in the small space, and then realized, hey, maybe, maybe I should go back. What was that feeling like? What was that sort of thought process?

Jessica Mehring 9:56
It was very frustrating. I mean, I had such high hopes. We all do. We just were shiny and new in our in our own businesses and we just want to help. It was very frustrating because I never wanted to feel like I never wanted these small businesses to feel like they couldn’t afford me or that they just weren’t anywhere. I didn’t want them to feel bad that they didn’t have the budget, you know, but the fact is, there’s only so much I can do with a limited budget, I only have so much time I only have so many there’s so many resources myself. So it was very, very frustrating because I could not price things low enough to do enough for these folks. So the little I was able to do just it didn’t move the needle for them as much as I wanted it to. Yeah, sure. I can write higher converting content. When I can write some blog posts. I can write a white paper, ebook, infographic, whatever, and it’ll convert much better than their other stuff is But once the Tuesday kinds of things like that, it’s just such a small blip on the grand scheme. It really to make the bigger impact. It needs to be a bigger engagement. Gotcha. I don’t want off blog post, you know, right, right.

Jason Resnick 11:14
Yeah. So was it a natural transition to say, or you know what, I’m just going to go back to the corporate world, or did you explore other options before doing that?

Jessica Mehring 11:23
It was a natural transition in a lot of ways. Yeah, I had a lot of connections by that point. I like to make friends I don’t call it networking. I like to make friends. Wherever I go, I like to make friends I say I’m really good at staying in touch with people and and, you know, just because I genuinely like to get to know people. So I had a lot of folks that I could reach out to in in the corporate space in the large enterprise space. And again, the smaller companies now selling to these large companies. So it was a very easy place for me to kind of start shifting to and again, I love being the technology space to working with it and software solution providers. I’m really, really jazzed about that kind of stuff, which I know is crazy, especially for non technician. I mean, my college degree is in history. You know, I’m like a non tech as you can get. But because I grew up in that space, I can understand a lot of the technology better than most I think I can speak the language. It’s it’s just a really, really fun space to me. Dance Party was a natural transition, but not to say that there weren’t, there weren’t steps I had to take along the way. And if you’ll indulge me to kind of get a little bit deeper into

Jason Resnick 12:41
Absolutely, yeah, that’s what I want. My next question was if you want to go there.

Jessica Mehring 12:46
Yeah. So I had a really good mix of clients. This is about two, two and a half years ago, I had a really good mix of clients. I’d say half of the large companies half of them smaller, pretty well funded Really startups, though, that we’re selling to the bigger companies? Was it actually know that at that point, it was a lot of smaller businesses that were selling to other smaller businesses. I hadn’t even gotten that far to two and a half years ago. And things just took a nosedive. I mean, that’s all I can say is that all of a sudden, things started going south for my business. clients were, were drying up, you know, they were coming to the end of their contract and not reeling. clients that have come to me pretty regularly for projects over the years had stopped coming around and weren’t responding when I reached out. I’m good with the follow ups. But they weren’t responding. The new clients I was getting on the phone, we’re pushing back on my price, which I’m not, I’m not cheap. We’re not the highest price game in town either. And so that was really shocking. And they were also comparing the two books that they were finding on up work. I mean, I was actually having these calls where they were saying Well, this guy that we got enough work can do that for, you know, a quarter of what you’re saying you can do that for. And I’m with I don’t know what to say to that because you get what you pay for. You know, I have massive experience over this guy. I know I’m literally known in the space for the quality of the content that I produce, if you want to go with the cheaper guy, have fun with that. Right? Right. But so I was having these really bizarre conversations. I felt like I’d done a really good job of establishing my value up to that point, and all of a sudden, the conversations were going like that, and it was so weird. And I was like, okay, something has changed. Something has changed in my market space. I need to look at this. I need to figure this out. I need to solve this problem because my business is not going to survive this. And it was really, really scary because, you know, I I luckily had savings. I think as a business owner, it’s a good thing to have saved. This is absolutely a house living on savings for a couple of months there. And it was really, really terrifying. And again, I’m just sitting with us I’m kind of trying to figure it out, I see that the copywriting space is really getting inundated by a lot of newbies claiming that their, their, their specialty is SAS software as a service. And somehow I was getting lumped in with that. And a friend of mine recommended that I look into a coach a business coach, his name is Matthew Pollard. And I looked at his stuff, I thought, Oh, you know, this, this guy has some interesting things to say. I’ll get on a call with him. So I had a console call and he’s in very good salesman, and he’s very, very good at what he does. So by the end of that call, I yeah, I’ve given them my credit card number, even though like I said, things are not going to get to that point, but it felt like an investment I should make. So I did and I started going through his program, the rapid growth Academy and one The very first exercises in that was this it was a finding your niche exercise. And at the time was like I know what my knees is I don’t need this but I was starting to build desperate Not gonna lie and I thought okay, I will I’m just gonna do this because what do we have to lose and his version of this exercise was a little different he really he kind of had you put all of your clients on a page and just keep narrowing it down you narrow it down by the clients you love to work with narrow down by the clients you know, narrow that list down by the clients that you’ve got the best results for narrow down further by the clients that are the easiest for you to work with that pay their invoices on time, narrow it down again to the the clients that pay best to and he’s keep narrowing down the list until you have kind of a you have this very small really listen in. And then you look at the common thread and what’s the common thread through this businesses and I don’t know my really, really quickly, oh my gosh, all of these businesses are selling enterprise IT and or software, but specifically selling it for software to large companies like oh my gosh, okay, well, that’s narrower.

That’s a lot narrower. So I planted my flag, I changed my website to talk specifically to companies that that are focused on enterprise sales. And I had luckily tons of experience in that right. And as soon as I started talking about that, things started turning around. And I started picking up clients again, and the conversations were worked better again. And then through that process, I was able to start seeing a pattern in the types of people that were that I was talking to, you know, who was I getting on the phone with and who were the decision makers because especially the large companies are multiple decision makers, so that I went through the exercise a little Okay, now I got to know I’m good bills are paid. Let’s look at this new client set and look at the titles who you know who, who’s paying the bills, who’s who’s making that final, the financial decision, who am I getting on the phone with initially, they might not be the same person and really zeroing in on the role and how they fit into the broader organization. And how, how they manage their team as well was very interesting. So it was it was a process.

Jason Resnick 18:39
As you can plainly hear the process of defining your ideal client is just that process. There is no quick hit or silver bullet here. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight just because you want it to or you read a blog post, Jessica is process is very similar to the client quad framework. my coaching clients and feast members go through taking a look at all of the people, projects and companies that you’ve worked with. And then distilling them down into common characteristics and elements is much easier to do than the pie in the sky, dreaming of what the potential of an ideal client looks like. If you want worksheets, exercises, and the ability to create the ideal client and the precise solution to offer that client, so that you are the go to resource and build a sustainable business, head over to feast academy.com today, as a member, you’ll get the processes and templates to not only figure out your ideal client and those services, but you’ll also learn how to figure out how to price those services so that it makes a no brainer decision for that client. That’s why I want to invite you to check out feast by using the code comment at checkout, you could get your first month for only $20. feast is the community and resource hub for developers and designers ready to get off the project searching hamster wheel and actually run the business that they set out to build. feast helps position you in the market with what you do, who you help, and helps you build the processes and systems for everything to build a sustainable business. That includes sales and marketing, delivery, client management, pricing, and of course, scoping out what your ideal client is. Your business isn’t the same as everyone else’s. And this is the differentiator in feast. When you become a member of feast. You’re going to get personalized guidance from myself. It is essential for me to meet you where you are, and make sure that you are getting the exact tools so that you don’t get lost in the shuffle. The moment you sign up, we’re going to have a chat. Yes, we will have a chat, so that I can build you a custom syllabus of resources within fees to meet you where you are. If you want to stop chasing down that next project all the time, so that you can start living your life, go to feast Academy calm and use the code conversation at checkout. And your first month is only $20.

It’s funny, I think you said his name is Matthew, right? Yeah, I’ve never I haven’t heard of him. And as you started describing it, it’s something similar that I went through myself. When I hit essentially, burnout was very much a generalist developer doing lots of different ecommerce projects, but that was doing Ruby on Rails and Java in all sorts of different technology stacks and things of that nature. And it was my second time, going full time for myself, and I was like, maybe this thing that I’ve thought about Since I was a teenager is not a realistic thing for me at all. And I had just proposed to my girlfriend at the time, literally a month before I was looking burnt out, didn’t sleep, working 16 to 18 hour days and as like, maybe I just need to go back and sit in a cube somewhere, like maybe this just isn’t for me. So I had a conversation with her and she kind of gave me the kick in the butt and said, Well, I know that that’s not what you want. And so you definitely know that and, and so on and so forth. And while she’s the rock, she wants to plan she wants to, like for me, I couldn’t put her and our lives together in that up and down roller coaster that I knew was going to happen, right and so like you were saying, like, you know, things are drying up and things. And what I ended up doing was essentially an exercise that was similar to that and what I help my coaching clients with now I call it the client quad where I basically have them fold up a couple of piece of paper into quadrants and listen All the clients that you like to work with and list out all the clients that you don’t like to work with, and the projects and things like that, and then find the common threads. And what happens is after that exercise, you have this sort of red light green light thing where you can start to look at all of the things that you don’t like the common threads. And put that aside. When I did this, I actually had that list on my monitor, so that when I was on calls, like the Skype calls at the time, like this was front and center, but if any of those things started ticking the boxes, okay, well, this is not a good fit. But on the other side, you had this sort of common thread, like, I started to see a pattern and much like you, I went, I’ve done that a few different times to further niche down or figure out who my ideal client is, what type of person are they? What type of role are they in the business, what type of business do they have, like size wise, what they stand for, and so on and so forth. And so, it’s awesome to hear you take that same exercise and almost recycle It to further your path and such. Was this the only sort of exercise that you did or did you explore other ways to try to hone down on this on your ideal client?

Jessica Mehring 24:13
Well I gotta say first I love that you have a red light list as part of the process that is so important and and something that it’s similar to how to when I coach copywriters, like the newer copywriters, especially every once while I get into that position to give advice, and I tell them, don’t ever put a project in your portfolio that you did for a client you dislike. Absolutely, yeah. Because like attracts like, does not matter your belief system that is the truth. Yep. No matter how beautiful that end product are. Now, if you put that in your portfolio and you hated every second of working on that project, you’re going to get more clients like that. It’s not a good thing. So I love that you have that that red whitelist the No, you know, I did all this usual exercises over the years it all the different business programs, how you to go through the avatar, the client avatar process and a buyer persona process. And there’s a lot of value to that to getting to getting kind of a general idea of who you’re targeting. But in the end, I really feel like you have to talk to these people, it can’t just be a piece of paper, it can’t be a PowerPoint deck on your computer of your buyer personas, which is a lot of what I get delivered, that you have to actually talk to these people to get to know who they are and what keeps them up at night, beyond what’s on the paper in front of you. And that’s really what what I was able to do by first doing that nice exercise and then then once things were stable, looking at, at the organizational structure and all of these these companies that I loved and You know, I, I’m very communicative I love talking to my clients. I like to consider my clients friends at a certain point in the relationship you know, I like to check in on a mixture of they’re doing get asked how their kids are doing. And so I was I was able to get that personal with them and ask them you know really what what’s going on in your organization above and beyond the content stuff that you’re hiring me to do what’s going on in your organization? What’s going on that’s keeping you up at night, and having those personal conversations it made these these avatars three dimensional?

Jason Resnick 26:33
Absolutely. I love that and I’ve seen on one of your talks, I think is titled this and I saw definitely saw it on your website and things like that about putting the conversation before conversion. For me when I saw that, that was a big, huge thing for me as well. Like, just reach out, have a conversation. See what it is that they like, they enjoy working with you. Like how do you find more people like that? What you could be better at right? Maybe there’s just a miscommunication or there is a way in which you can solve a problem that you didn’t even know that they had those sort of things. And so having that conversation before conversion, I, first of all, I love the phrase, the phrase, I gotta steal it, but credit you all the way through. Because for me, it’s like, I get asked all the time, like, how do I improve my sales, close rates? How do I you know, do this? How do I improve, getting more clients? Stop having a conversation with me and asking me this question and go have a conversation with a lead or client or somebody like that, like, stop talking stuff.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
But put the megaphone down.

Jason Resnick 27:44
Stop talking to me on Twitter and go ahead and pick up a conversation but with a past client of yours or a current client or potential lead. So you said that you you form essentially form these relationships and friendships with your clients and things of that nature. Did you actually tactfully say, hey, I want to I’d love to have a conversation with you for about 10 minutes? Or was it more of a natural sort of just organic way that you just happen to find out all this stuff?

Jessica Mehring 28:14
Both? Absolutely. But there there are certainly cases where I said hey, you know what, I just I love working with you. I love the work we do together. This is really a direction I would love to go and more in in my business. You know, coming bigger Bandra Korean that’s a terrible phrase don’t agree with with anybody that’s demanding. No, I you know, I’d asked him, Hey, can I get on both you for for 10 minutes or so. And just talking and see kind of how you feel about this arrangement and how and what’s working for you What’s not and so that works really well. I also have a survey that I send my client after I’ve been working with them for a little while. Just a really quick and easy Google forum. With some pointed questions about how they feel about the the arrangement so far as what’s working and what’s not, and I have yet to have a client refuse to fill that out. You know, by the time we get to that point, we’ve got a really solid relationship. And they’re willing to bend over backwards to help me because I’ve bent over backwards to help them. And I bring this approach into my methodology for producing content to and I think this, I think, in the end, this is a whole ecosystem that I’ve created around me. So, you know, I approach the content writing process from a relationship building standpoint. So when I talk to these clients, especially when they’re when they’re new to me, and I’m kind of telling them what my philosophy is, my processes are. My goal is to build the relationship between your company and your customers. Every single thing I do for you should build relationship. It was not building relationship, I’m not doing my job. And so that’s really It I start out these these client engagements is from this relationship building standpoint. So I think that transitioning to, you know, now I have a relationship with the client is a very easy transition because they know that relationship building is a cornerstone of everything I do. So I think that’s helped.

Jason Resnick 30:17
Yeah, it’s like a sort of a meta night, like this inception, like,

Unknown Speaker 30:23
totally, yeah,

Jason Resnick 30:25
I get a little bit of that too, because what I help my clients with is more of the onsite personalization, learning about the subscribers in the email list so that then we can convert people more and quicker on the front end of things. And, you know, just even in and of itself, my clients have told me, You did this to me, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything to you. It’s just you send certain signals and I was able to read that and this is the solution that I can provide. And so I think hundred percent right. It’s an ego system it’s a way in which your your business runs and how you serve both your business yourself, but also your clients and their clients and their customers and saying things of that nature. It’s awesome to hear, hear somebody else talk about some of the things like I’m like, ah, stop talking to me go talk to the clients and at some of these other things that you’re mentioning, for me, I’m like jumping up and down inside and this and that. But it but it truly is. It’s like that point at which where you were struggling and you’re like, oh, okay, I’m sure much like myself. There was some self doubt there. And maybe, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing. But then it was like, Okay, well, let me figure this out like that. There’s that point at which I feel that you said I need to reflect a little bit where am I good, what is my sweet spot? What can I leverage maybe my past, but also learn about moving forward because you saw that kind of shift in the marketplace and things weren’t working as well as the way they were. How can sharing a piece of advice? How can somebody key in on that? Or is it just an instinctual sort of thing that there might be a shift in the market or things aren’t as what they used to be or seem to be?

Jessica Mehring 32:18
I think there are red flags to look for. I think that almost everybody has some instinct when things are starting to not go in a good direction. And you just need to pay attention to that. I think it’s easy to just keep chugging along and and ignore red flags because you just got to get the work done. But you grow the red flags too long and you end up in the position that I was in where you’re living on your savings. That’s not a good position to be in because then then you’re making decisions out of desperation, too, and you perpetuate the cycle of attracting bad bits. So you really if you can catch it earlier than I did. You’re better off And you know, hindsight is 2020. Right. And looking back, there were red flags leading up to that situation. Now I was noticing conversations in in some of the online spaces that I participate in some of the Facebook groups and slack groups and things like that. The conversations were looking different. And some of the questions I was getting asked by prospects on the phone were different. And again, I was I was getting questioned about my price where I had never had before. And eventually it all culminated and I just kind of moved, you know, everything was going bad. But there but things were happening like that up to that point that if I had paid attention, I probably could have picked up on that shift before things got that bad. And then yeah, had that had the time to reflect and make better decisions before things got to that point.

Jason Resnick 33:57
Yeah, same thing with me now. Um, because I experienced that burnout, depression and all that, like, I’m way more acute to those sort of symptoms, if you will, leading up to that, because I don’t want to ever want to be there again. But it’s just very similar. Like I’ve seen change in sales cycles and who I’m talking to and what the market is dictating things like that. And you don’t, sometimes you just overlook these things. You’re just like, oh, that’s just that person, or that’s just that project. And even if you catch it, and then if you actually do some sort of a thought gathering or just jot down a few sentences after a call, well, then you can at least have something to go back and look at later on to say, hey, how come I haven’t closed a lot of these deals when I had been in the past or something of that nature? Right. And so I think it’s important to do that stuff. And obviously business is great,

Jessica Mehring 34:52
right? business is great.

Jason Resnick 34:54
So when you decided and like you said, still evolved. Has that really impacted your business but also your life?

Jessica Mehring 35:04
I’m, I’m working with fewer clients on a deeper level, I’m able to make a much bigger impact. So you know, in the services that I provide, there’s been a big difference. I’ve also shifted a lot, just my day to day activities have changed. So I’m spending less time writing. Oddly enough, even though I’m a writer, spending less time writing and and more time communicating really, with my clients, and everything that I produce is very research backed. So the research is still very much part of the process, but the research element has expanded as well. So I’m spending more time looking into my clients, customers and spending time in those spaces. Yeah, there’s just been a shift in the day to day activities. I spend more time on the sales calls as well. In the copywriting space, there’s this this push to kind of just make everything a very succinct process. 15 minute consult call nailed down for the, for the contract in the invoice and then the next call to 30 minute call you do this and I had to really start paying attention to my own paper, like keep my eyes on my own paper there in recent years because a lot of that was not serving me or my customers very well. And so I do spend more time conversing with my clients than maybe some of my colleagues do. And that can be emails that can be I try to keep it to emails and scheduled zoom chats. But be I really don’t Converse over slack or text message, anything like that I do have boundaries. Yes. But there’s definitely a lot more conversations happening, which has the added benefit of helping me get to know my clients even better. And and beings have so much more value to them. And just being in a position to help them more there’s more opportunities for me because I’m so much more plugged in. And there’s this push again and myself. I don’t know if you’re experiencing it in your space as well. But in my space, the push towards product ties to services, and kind of creating a machine, really out of your business. And there’s there’s a lot of value to that there really is. But with the clients that I serve, that machine doesn’t get them very far. And it it doesn’t serve them. And it’s, it just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. So I’ve really had to again, stop paying attention to what all my peers are doing, and start paying attention to what my clients are telling me. And what they what they need from me.

Jason Resnick 37:41
Absolutely. Yeah, I echo that statement, not like from the hilltops. So I applaud you for that. So what’s next over the next 612 months?

Jessica Mehring 37:54
Well, right now I’m actually I’m building out an engagement model for the large enterprise companies that is a much bigger thing than I’ve ever built before. I’m very much tried to stay in my lane. On the implementation side, I love the writing. I’m particularly good at writing. I write what I call conversion content. So I bring conversion, copywriting best practices into content production. And I wrote very high converting content. And I love doing that. I love writing. I love the research. I love watching the results roll in, I love being on the ground floor of that and really being implemented for my clients. But what I what I realized very, very recently, actually is that by refusing to even look in the other lambs, I’m denying my clients something that they really desperately need, which in a lot of cases is some diagnostics. They know things are not working in a particular area of their marketing. They don’t know why. I’m the kind of person I can go in and figure that out. And then the strategic side as well. So once we’ve diagnose the problem, then making a very, very specific very detailed plan for how to solve it. So I’m building out an engagement model for the larger companies that includes the the diagnostics and the strategic pieces that again, I’ve been I’ve been denying them for a very long time because I love the writing part. which interestingly there’s a lot of copywriters out there who don’t actually love the writing part. be surprised to hear that but it’s very true. They love to they love to get to know the companies and learn the products and talk to the customers and do all the you know those parts of the conversion copywriting process, especially. But then when it comes to the writing, it’s kind of a slog, actually really love the writing. So

Jason Resnick 39:46
yeah, I hear that with developers to they like the idea of scoping the whole project, figure out the problems, bring out the solutions. And then when lines of code come you’re like, how do I outsource this? The

Jessica Mehring 40:00
That’s too funny.

Jason Resnick 40:02
So this has been awesome. Jessica, where can folks reach out and say thanks,

Jessica Mehring 40:06
the best place to find me and all my contact info and my philosophies and content and all that fun stuff is horizonpeakconsulting.com.

Jason Resnick 40:15
Awesome, and will certainly link that up in the show notes. Jessica and I connected on Twitter. So we’ll add your Twitter handle as well into the show notes. Jessica, thanks for sharing your some time and your experience with us today.

Jessica Mehring 40:29
Thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation.

Jason Resnick 40:32
And for those listening, until next time, it’s your time to live in the feast.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, I could speak for both Jessica and myself by saying that we’d love to hear the one takeaway that you’ve got from this episode. It’s really super simple. The podcast app of your choice, presumably this one that you are using right now, drop in a comment or review, or go ahead and share it in a tweet and tag me at rezzz, and that’s with three Z’s. I’ll be happy to share it with Jessica. Don’t forget also to hit that subscribe button so that you’ll be the first to listen in next week when we’ll be back with Kaylee more. Kaylee is a writer who specializes in blog content for e commerce platform, and we’ll be diving into how she’s transformed her business through her ideal client. Till next time, short time to live in the feast.