In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner challenges the common misconception that audience size determines fair exchange when borrowing audiences.
What if the key to successful relationship marketing isn't about trading audiences, but about providing value that makes others look better in front of their audience? In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner challenges the common misconception that audience size determines fair exchange when borrowing audiences. By reframing the value exchange as a way to help others achieve better results, Michelle shares examples from her own business to illustrate how focusing on value can lead to mutually beneficial relationships.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 years that I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, and they need to be centering sequence. Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business, and the order in which you take them, is far more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. And as you know, in every episode of Sequence Over Strategy, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business.
Question from the Community
And today's question is one that gets asked over and over again when I'm talking about relationship marketing, and specifically the piece of relationship marketing that involves borrowing audiences, by which I mean pitching yourself to be on a podcast, to speak, to guest teach in someone else's community, anything you're doing to insert yourself into a setting where your ideal audience is already gathered. And if you've heard me talk about relationship marketing at all, you know I'm a big fan of using audience borrowing as an awareness strategy, meaning meeting people by, again, inserting yourself into those spaces that they're already gathered. Don't assume you're going to meet them because they find your material somewhere. Instead, this is about being proactive and getting out there and meeting folks where they're already gathered. But doing so isn't always as easy as it sounds on the surface. We'll get into it, but first let me read you the question.
“I feel a bit stuck as a new business owner making asks such as asking to be a podcast guest or guest expert, aka feeling a little awkward trying to borrow an audience. Without an audience of my own, it feels like an unfair exchange. How do I reframe that for myself and or communicate the value that's in it for them?”
Oh my goodness, my friends, this is such a common concern and I get it, because imposter syndrome and all the things, they're very real. And you know what I'm about to say here, especially if you are not thinking in sequence first. If you are trying to answer this immediate question, Instead of the right question first, yeah, it's going to sound really difficult because it's going to sound like your newness is a deficit when it's not. It's going to feel like you're trying to enter a space that you have no business being in. If you are just asking that question of, hey, there's this big audience I want to get in front of and how do I do that? That's going to be really intimidating if that's the question you're asking. So stay tuned today because I'm going to break down that question and I am going to actually help you find the question you really should be asking first and share examples from my business about why thinking in terms of the size of that audience is the wrong way to think about fair exchange when you are thinking about borrowing audiences and going and getting in front of the audiences that you're seeking.
So as we often do on this show, let's break this question down to its component parts so we can start finding the questions we really need to ask and in what order we need to ask them. And if you haven't figured this out yet, I'm going to take a quick aside. I break these questions into their pieces because that's where we can find interesting places to kind of poke and prod and to say, hey, is this really the right question that we want to be asking? Right.
We've talked about the five whys. We've talked about getting down to foundational things in another way. that you can figure out and find holes in the question you're asking is by really breaking it down into its component parts and asking, what does this really mean? What does this part of the question mean? So we're going to do that today, and we do that in every episode. But I just wanted to point out to you that that's why I do this, is to help you understand where some of the flags are. You can say, hey, I could be asking a different question here. So with that little rant aside, let's get back to the question and break it down.
We start with, “I feel a bit stuck as a new business owner making asks, such as asking to be a podcast guest or a guest expert.” Normal and fair, right? This part of the question is very normal. Like I said, imposter syndrome is very real. And when you're new, of course, you're going to feel a little awkward with doing that. So good to acknowledge it. But then let's separate this statement from the rest of the question. Let's separate the statement about how you feel from the actual strategy. Because then we come up with the statement, without an audience of my own, it feels like an unfair exchange.
The Big Red Flag
Okay, here's the heart of the question and what we need to break down, right? Because here's the big red flag. And again, I'm not giving this question to a specific person because I have been asked this approximately 47,000 times. So yes, this question did pass across my desk again this week, but I get asked this multiple times a week, so we can all relate to it. But this is the exact wrong way to think about this.
So I'm going to repeat that statement again. Without an audience of my own, it feels like an unfair exchange. Do you catch what problem we have here? It's the beginning of that statement, without an audience of my own. This means that you are going into this assuming there is only one equation for fair exchange and that is some sort of one-to-one audience swap without an audience of my own. When you make that assumption, and again everybody makes this assumption, you are wildly limiting yourself.
There are so many other value-based exchanges that can be made. Immediately, you are limiting yourself to an audience exchange and there's just no reason to do this. And I'm going to get a little dramatic here, but I want to point this out to you how silly this is. Because this is the equivalent of thinking there's only one acceptable form of payment. I'll be completely ridiculous here. I am having my driveway cement replaced this week.
So if I really wanted to stretch this, I could say that according to the logic in this statement, the only fair exchange for having my driveway replaced would be for me to go to my contractor's house and replace his cement for him. That makes no sense. So I hope that sounded just as ridiculous as I think it did, because of course the value exchange is not me providing something that I don't have, aka skills in replacing concrete, for his skills in that same area. I'm going to provide something that is of value to him, which is money. And this is the same thing.
If somebody else has an audience, you do not need to provide an audience in return. That is the same as saying, you know how to lay concrete, so I'm going to go lay concrete for you. That makes no sense. I completely understand where it comes from because, of course, it's your first instinct, but it doesn't make sense. And we can come up with a better option for you. Whether you're new, by the way, or whether you've been in business for years and do have an audience, it's very possible that an audience exchange is not the best value for you, so you want to think through this as well.
Okay, so now that we're in agreement on that, let's move on to the next statement because now we can start to cook and we can start to put something together. And this person says, how do I reframe that for myself and or communicate the value in it for them? Thank you. Because ‘reframe that for myself’ is my favorite statement in here. This person did recognize that maybe there was a different way to think about value exchange. So please do. Please reframe this immediately from any kind of one-on-one exchange and instead think about the type of value that you can provide.
And again, as I was saying earlier, this is whether you already have an audience, you still may not want to do a one-on-one trade because that may not be the best value for both parties. So whether you're brand new and you are in this kind of imposter syndrome where you're just scared that they're going to ask to borrow your audience and you're not going to have something to give back, or if you have an audience to give but it's just not the best match, you want to think beyond that. You do not want to get stuck into this whole of the one-on-one audience exchange.
Valuable Examples
So let's talk about what this can look like. And we'll start with examples from my business. Because guess what? I am in the exact same situation. Confession time. I speak to some very big audiences about the topics we discuss here on the podcast. like audiences that are regularly 10 to 20 times the size of mine. And I think the largest gap was somewhere between like 50 and 75 times the size of my audience. So you best believe that I'm not trading audiences. The people asking me to come speak to their audiences would be wasting their time speaking to mine. They're not even interested in doing so. Not because you're not all lovely, but because there aren't enough of you.
And side note, you know, we know why this is. It's because I primarily relationship market and therefore I haven't historically placed a lot of emphasis on building a huge list. So some people who may be considered my peers in the industry have a much larger list because they have been focused on traffic marketing while I've been focused on relationship marketing. There's nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but in these situations, it can lead to an audience size mismatch. But that doesn't mean it leads to a value mismatch in any way, shape, or form.
Because if I went by the logic of this question, I would never be able to do any of the things that I do because none of the people would accept that exchange. They don't want to talk to my audience. But what do they do want? They want me to make them look better. And that's the key here. Let's reframe this. This is not about a one-to-one value exchange of trading an audience for an audience. Instead, let's think about the root, the sequence. What are we actually trying to accomplish here? What we're actually trying to accomplish is help each other with our businesses.
And so if people are asking me to talk to their large audiences, what are they actually asking for? And again, that answer where you can get some really productive and fun value-based options for yourself is to think that they are asking me, or if I approach them, my pitch would be from a place of making them look better. Not from a place of like, hey, let's trade audiences and get some leads. I want to think, how can I make them look better?
So come again, let me share some examples from my business of what this looks like. And this is all about building the right relationships and knowing your ideal connection avatars and knowing that there is a value in place there where you can help each other. That's when this stuff becomes really obvious. So one way I do this is many of you know about my Networking That Pays program, teaching networking, and teaching people how to have the right connections in their business. Well, guess what? There are a lot of business coaches out in the world who have wonderful programs to help you build your business, but they don't want to touch the networking side of things. It's a complicated, complex topic. It distracts from their curriculum and it's tough to fit into how they have their program structured.
However, they know that if their people have those networking skills and have some of the fundamental understandings of ideal connection avatars and a five-day-a-week outreach plan and all the things that I teach in networking that pays, they know that if their people have that information, their people will get better results from their business programs. So they don't care how big my audience is. They say, “will you come in and teach my people about networking? Because when you do so, they're going to get better results from what I'm teaching them, and therefore I will look better.”
So then I, Michelle, who is looking to borrow audiences, I know I can go in there and pitch them and say, “I will make you look better. I will help your customers get better results from your materials if you allow me to teach this one piece that's not already included in your program.” And they're thrilled to have that. And of course, I meet some folks who then probably come over and take networking that pays as a supplement or want to work with me individually as a supplement to the work that they're doing with the other person.
So there's an example of a value and how I'm always trying to think about it, where I am always trying to say, how can I make them look good, how can I make their people get better results from their programming by inserting a little bit of information? And that's a really valuable way of thinking about it because if you're in a situation where you're pitching yourself, if you're coming at it from that perspective of like, hey, I'm going to help your people get better results, They're not going to care. That is the value.
There's a different value there. There's a value where you are coming into this thinking, oh my gosh, they're going to want to find new leads for me. So I better have an audience that I can offer to them. But that may not be the case. They may see equal value. And from experience, I will tell you they do see equal value in not finding new leads from your world, but from you helping their current customers or their current audiences get better results. That is just as if not more valuable. So that is a way to think about this.
Even More Valuable Examples
A couple of more examples from my business: I work with a number of sales consultants who have a lot of people who come in and say, oh gosh, I need to learn more sales skills, right? Well, that's valid, but a lot of times it's also valid that Those same folks need networking skills or need their business models to be played up a little bit and fixed up a little bit. So again, I can come into their audiences and I can talk about what does it look like to have an aligned business model. What does it look like to have the correct network so that you have the correct leads so that these sales skills that you are learning will actually have some leads, you'll have some leads to apply those things to. That's another case where those folks are not looking to me to find new leads.
Our marketing cooperation is not about finding new leads. It is about giving their current audience more information so that that current audience gets better results from the information they are receiving from that person and therefore signs up to do more work with that person and of course sometimes signs up to do work with me too. that's what that value can look like.
Another example, I do a lot of work with organizations and group programs that support parents and their parenting journey as entrepreneurs. So it's a focus, the programs are focuses on parents and how do you juggle that entrepreneurship plus parenting. So the people leading those groups don't necessarily get into business fundamentals, but it's on the mind of everyone in their groups. So if I can come in and I can provide some value around business training, then again, there are people are going to get better results from their business and from their home life and from their parenting journey, because I've given them some perspective. I've cleared the air of some of the struggles they are having on the business side of things, which just opens the space to have time and resources and focus to think about how they want to show up as parents while they're also entrepreneurs.
So again, the value is on helping that community and helping that community get better results from a program they're currently in. And sure, some of those people come work with me, but again, the value is not in a one-to-one lead exchange. The value is in me going in where people are already gathered and adding some additional information that helps them take what they're working on even further. And that's what you want to be thinking about, right? So that's the common denominator.
How to Be A Hero
Their audiences are getting better results from their products and services when I've also interacted with the audience. I'm going to repeat that. When I interact with their audience and add some networking perspective or business design perspective, that audience gets better results from that person's product and service. I mean, that's a tremendous value. Tremendous value right there. And sure, maybe some of their people have done purchases for me too, but all of their people have benefited from hearing from me. And again, made the results their people got from their products better. And that's the key. And in those situations, it doesn't matter if my audience is two people, 50 people, 500 people, because I'm not bringing my audience to the equation. I'm bringing my value. And when I do that, I'm making them look like heroes. And that's a win-win that has absolutely nothing to do with the size of an audience.
And by the way, I kind of laughed earlier about audience size, but I've been doing this for over 10 years. So I've built a decent audience size now, still nothing in comparison with maybe some of the audiences of 100,000 plus that I speak to, but it's decent. But I was doing this when I had less than 50 people on my email list. So if you are looking at me and saying, I'm new, right? This doesn't feel like a fair value exchange. reframe the value exchange. As this person in the question originally said, how can I reframe the value exchange? And the way that you do that is to stop thinking about an exact trade. Stop thinking audience for audience and start thinking about the value that you can provide. How can you help their people get better results from the information they're already getting?
That makes you a hero and that's going to get you invitations to come back over and over and over again. and some of those people will become leads for you as well because they will want to supplement what they are learning in whatever program you are teaching them or whatever audience you've met them in. They're going to want to supplement that with some specialty from you. So in summary, let's complete this reframe and challenge you to come up with your own value.
And by the way, this is again, why the concept of the ideal connection avatars is so important. And if you don't know what those are, they are covered in my networking that pays course and the free training that goes with it. And so we're going to link to that here because you need to be pitching this stuff to people who actually do care about the value that they're providing their audience, right? That's a really important piece here.
You can't be pitching this to people who are completely transactional because they will just be thinking one-to-one audience growth lead generation. You need to be out there finding the people who value relationship marketing just as you, and there are plenty of them out there, I promise you that, and understanding this value equation.
So question one, you want to think about what information do you have that will make this person look better in front of their audience? And/or help their audience get better results in their program? That is the correctly sequenced question, not how do I trade audiences? How do I get enough of an audience in order to qualify to reach out to these people and try to trade them? Because once you can understand that value, and again, you do that by understanding your ideal connection avatars, all of those examples I gave you were examples I identified when I did my own Ideal Connection avatar work. And I was thinking about which audiences need me and what value can I provide and what is parallel to what I'm doing but non-competitive. And these were all answers I came up with.
And once you know that, you can have a pitch that you can head out with. You have a way to go build some relationships around this value piece that you can bring into a relationship rather than a one-to-one transactional trade. So I would challenge and welcome all of you to take this as your next step in the sequence, is to think through, what is the value I provide? Or where are the audiences that are learning enough where if I just add my little thing, right, that it will really help them get better results? What's the equivalent?
If I'm taking networking information and sharing it with business building programs, knowing that those folks are going to get better results with my networking information, what programs are out there that you can add your little special thing to that will help them get better results. I would challenge you to take a minute here and think through that and come up with some ideas and start gathering ideas about your ideal connection avatars in that way.
And with that, I'm going to thank you as always for being here. If you haven't yet done so, please subscribe and even rate the show wherever you're listening. It just makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. And again, I am just so blown away by all the feedback I'm getting and just hearing how much this show is helping all of you makes me so, so happy. So if you would mind being a part of helping others find it, I would be so appreciative of that. And as I mentioned earlier, two resources if you want to think more about who your borrowed audience partners can be and think more about that Ideal Connection Avatar exercise.
You can find a free training at themichellewarner.com backslash free training. Or you can just read about networking that pays at themichellewarner.com backslash networking that pays. And both of those talk to you about how to think about these ideal connection avatars and think about that value piece so that we get you out of the mindset of feeling like, oh, I'm new or I don't have enough or I'm not in a position to do this one-on-one exchange. And instead, let's think about some value. And while you're doing that, I'm going to be cooking up a new episode for you. So I will see you right back here in two weeks. Thanks so much.