Click through to the good bits.

00:00 Introductions.

04:34 The idea of value.

07:51 About the author.

10:18 Foreword.

14:52 Five types of value.

18:19 How to understand the value of the product or service that you are providing?

25:33 Develop powerful stories.

26:51 Conclusion.

Martin Henley: [00:00:14] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley. This is The Effective Marketing content extravaganza and if you are here for the very first time, you won’t yet know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be more successful in your business. Providing what you need to be more successful in your business, is to know more about and be implementing more enthusiastically, efficiently and effectively sales and marketing in your business, which is of course what you need if you are going to be more successful and your business. You need more customers, you need more profitability, you need happier staff, you need happier customers, you need more profitability, nicer car, nicer holidays, public education for your children, and a wonderful, wonderful retirement. Of course, that’s what you need if you’re going to be successful in your business, all of those good things will come to you.

Martin Henley: [00:01:04] What goes on here is I bring in anyone I can find with experience that will be useful to you if you are looking to be more successful in your business. I review the very best and the very worst of content marketing content that is on the internet, and we review the news every couple of weeks with the wonderful Melanie Farmer, and we speculate wildly about what that might mean for you and your marketing life and your marketing career. There’s something else that goes on. I’m giving you everything I know about sales and marketing in the what the series.

Martin Henley: [00:01:35] Now there is a new thing. Before I tell you about the new thing, you should consider, if you think that sounds interesting and useful, if you are trying to be more successful in your business, I’m hoping it will be because that’s why we are here. Then you should take a second to like share, subscribe, comment, get involved because that will give us the motivation to drive on on this epic journey to give you everything you need to be successful in your in your business and in your marketing career. Today is a brand new thing that we haven’t done before, and we are going to call it Marketing Reviews, where I am going to review some marketing stuff now that will include in the future different softwares we’re using, different sources that we’re using different systems, that we’re using email marketing systems, all of these things. Because let me tell you, it is a proper pain in the bum deciding which of all these tools are going to be most effective for you. It will include marketing tools, it will include all sorts of marketing materials, and it’s going to include books. That’s what today is about, because a couple, two, three months ago. Well, no, before I tell you that what goes on as part of The Talk Marketing is at the end of every talk marketing, I ask people to recommend books or content that people should consume, but mainly books, because what I realised is I don’t read anything like enough and I certainly don’t read enough around my subject, which is marketing.

Martin Henley: [00:03:09] The idea is that I would get all of these people to recommend these books and I would start reading them, and that’s actually started to happen. But the other thing that started to happen is that the people I’m interviewing have actually produced books of their own, and that’s what’s gone on today. So today I’m here, I’m getting to it eventually with 3 minutes and 16 seconds in. But what I can tell you is that I’ve read a book. Go me! The book is called Add Value. And this is by a guy that I was lucky enough to interview on The Talk marketing series, a guy called Mark Carter. Now, Mark Carter, I’m going to tell you before I start reviewing this book is a little bit of a legend. I’m a little bit in love with what Mark Carter does. He’s a very, what is he? He’s a very literate, very well read, a brilliant presenter and educator is what Mark is. He’s an Englishman with a Scottish accent, but people with Scottish accents just sound a bit cleverer. I always think, apart from the fact that he now lives in Australia, which is where the man goes grow. So Mark Carter is a really good guy. He was introduced to me by Kobi Simmat, and Kobi invited Mark into his business to talk to him because he read this book, Add Value.

Martin Henley: [00:04:34] So the interesting thing about this is I’m very interested in the idea of value. I’m really interested in the idea of value and what’s interesting to me is what’s also interesting to Mark is that people don’t really understand about this value concept. But for me, the way I think about it, because I’m a simple soul, a much simpler soul than Mark is, I think the way business works is you have a market and you have a business, and then in the center you have whatever it is that the business offers. So that might be a product, it might be a service, it might be products or service pretty much covers their. It’s likely to be that thing. But what the business does is it takes that offering that product, that service to market, and it exchanges that for value, which is money. So what happens is you have a business looking for value. You have a consumer or a customer, a client looking for value. And the product of the service is that thing that sits in the middle. And when all of this works perfectly and it quite often does weirdly, because no one’s really thinking about it, hardly hard enough. But when it works perfectly, then what you have is very happy customers and very successful businesses. This is the key, but it’s in that value transaction.

Martin Henley: [00:05:51] So that’s the way I think about value and when I think about product development or service development or any of those things, then I always think about that sitting in the middle. Like essentially that is the trigger, that is the little bit of spark that sparks that value transaction. You give the customer value, they give you value, you give the customer happiness, satisfaction with the product or service. They give you a bit of money, which enables you to go on to think of lots of other ways to to satisfy your clients, be more successful, which is what you want to do. So the tagline here, let me just show you this is the title is Add Value, and a tagline is Discover your values. Find your worth, gain fulfilment in your personal and professional life. Now, I have to tell you, because I’m a simple soul, this isn’t the book I expected to read. So this kind of goes to the point of you can’t judge a book by its cover. You can’t judge a book by speaking to an app for an hour and a half to its author. You can’t judge a book by the brilliant Kobi, also I think provided some kind of a review of this for half an hour, I watched all of that. So. It’s not the book I expected it to be. That’s fine. It doesn’t need to be the book I expected it to be.

Martin Henley: [00:07:19] That’s absolutely fine. The question probably for Mark and for this book is, does this help you to discover your values, find your worth, and gain fulfillment in your personal and professional life? Now, I’ll be really honest with you. I’m not entirely sure if it does, but I think it’s because I haven’t been reading anything like an elf, so I don’t think my comprehension is anything like good enough. Let me give you a sense of where this goes. So the author, I will just tell you very quickly. Mark Carter, the brilliant Mark Carter, has over 20 years experience as a learning and development professional globally. He is a former tour leader and training manager with Contiki Holidays. He brings a unique perspective of depth and personal stories to conversations around behavioral sciences, business value and growth, both personally and professionally. Now, what I’m happy to concede immediately is that he does. When I spoke to him, he described his experience as like a 30 foot long petri dish, like thousands. This is the coach with the passengers on their holidays. Like thousands of these people coming through in his twenties and then leading them around Europe on these bus tours. So the question is then, does that qualify you to think about behavioral science, about leadership? And I think 100% it does, because people on a holiday are a pain in the bum. Can you imagine? Like this is the highlight of their year and then you put 30, 40 of these people into a bus and they’re on the bus, off the bus.

Martin Henley: [00:09:00] You can imagine the issues that you have every time you come to a border and during his twenties, I think he’s 50 now. When would that have been the nineties? Maybe there were border issues, maybe there were transportation issues, Maybe there were people getting lost issues. There were definitely people getting drunk issues. So I’m reminded when I think of Mark’s career of I think there was a program on British TV called Bus Tours or Bus Holiday or something like this where basically they followed buses around. It was a reality TV thing and it was a nightmare. People were a nightmare. I mean, in that instance, they had the added distraction of cameras and stuff. But does that qualify? If you do that for ten years and you go on to teach people how to do that job, does that qualify you to talk about behavioral science and leadership? I kind of think it does. I think it really does, because what you can’t do ever is lay down the law. You can’t bully people into doing stuff because they’re just going to go to your boss and say, look, that guy Mark is an idiot. He’s been bullying us for two weeks and we haven’t enjoyed it. So it’s always got to be every motivation. It has to be motivated, it has to be driven. It has to be influenced because you can’t just lay down the law and start shouting at people because they’re just going to grass you up to your boss and you’re not going to stay in the job for very long.

Martin Henley: [00:10:18] So I think it does. So that’s an interesting perspective. Now, the other reason or the reason that I’ve struggled with this a little bit and I can’t say I wasn’t warned because I was warned because right here in the Foreword, Mark tells us this. We live in an era of hashtag wisdom where once we return to our elders for guidance and inspirations, I didn’t search anything. Thank you. Google. Where once we would turn to our elders for guidance and inspiration, we now put influencers on a pedestal, allowing them to dust off and churn out tired old cliches and motivational one liners that attempt to capture the complexities of life into hashtag size snacks for the masses. Warning. If this is what you are looking for, it may be a good time to put this book down and log on to Facebook. So what’s going on here is we have I mean, the style of this book is a little it’s a very modern style. It reminds me a little bit of Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, these kinds of authors and what Mark does, and I’m not clever enough to know if he does it successfully or not, but he ties in essentially his travels around Europe in the nineties with a busload of drunken tourists and with this historical places that they’re visiting and passing through the Arc de Triomphe, whatever it is, the Leaning Tower of Pisa or whatever, he ties that into the history of the world, and he brings it back to this concept of value and how value works, which is.

Martin Henley: [00:11:59] Immense. I’m still feeling I’m going to have to read it again. I’m going to have to read it another two or three times, I think, to understand it. So, no, you’re going to get value out of this book. If you like reading, you’re going to have to read this book, I think, more than once or twice now. Is it necessary to do that? I don’t know. The thing that I love about this book is that it talks about subject that we should all be obsessing over this idea of value. And like so many things that go on in sales and marketing, nobody really understands what value means. Nobody understands what marketing means. No one understands what. I don’t know. Cpc means or all of this jargon. They don’t understand what it means, but we should all be obsessed. For me, if you are running a business or you are in business, then you are essentially in the value business. You know, you deliver value, you extract value, you have a successful business. This is the way the whole thing works. What I’m saying, what Mark’s saying is this isn’t an easy read necessarily. Like if if you.

Martin Henley: [00:13:01] Yeah. If you’re looking for an easy read this isn’t it? Some of the cast from this book, like some of the events in court, include like the Napoleonic Wars, the Second World War, and there’s all sorts of things like people who get mentioned, William Moulton Marston, who published papers. It’s full of references. Everyone’s in there. Daniel Pink is in there, author of Drive the documentary Happy Daniel Gilbert, PhD, and author of Stumbling on Happiness, German philosopher Edward Sprang. Simon Cynic, of course, Mali, Chechen, Mali, writer of the brilliant book Flow, which is on my list. Alfred Bean, a Daniel Goleman, psychologist and former science writer for the New York Times. Esther Hicks. Winston Churchill makes an appearance, Hitler makes an appearance. It’s like, I’m not joking when I tell you that this is a history of. Let’s say it’s a history of maybe Western Europe tied into the concept of value. That’s what it is. It’s insane. I mean, it is insane. I am still overwhelmed. The point of this is what is the point of this? The point of this is that people don’t really understand this idea of value, and people should understand the idea of value. If they are in business, they should understand the idea of value. So the book is then essentially goes on to talk about these five concepts, and I should probably go to the. I should probably go too. To give you a sense of these, there are five. There are five value types.

Martin Henley: [00:14:52] So the content is. So there’s five types are personal value, tangible value, emotional value, service value, and relationship value. Okay. So those are the five types. Now, I would argue if, for example, we come to the idea of tangible value, which is the one that we all know, if I give you a pound, can I deliver you a pounds worth of value? So for example, if you earn £2 an hour and it takes you half an hour to perform this task and. That’s not right. You earn £2 an hour and it takes you an hour to get this task done. If I charge £50 to get that task done, that clearly is a very tangible value. So the question is, do we need a history of money If we are going to think about tangible value, thinking about percentages, numbers, time, that always makes sense. But this book includes a history of money. So, for example, when we think about personal value, do we need to think about how we function? We need to think about intelligence. We need to think about emotional intelligence. I mean, this book really does cover it all. Like when we think about emotional value, he ties it into storytelling and sensory experiences, the wow factor. So we’re getting towards a little bit of Seth Godin here. I think when he talks about that, when we talk about service value, he’s talking about problems and solutions and self versus others and all these things and relationship value goes into the very beginnings of societies.

Martin Henley: [00:16:31] And this idea that like a a community should could only ever consist of 150 people or the optimized community is like 150 people. So you can see, I think I hope you can see that this book delivers real value. What I’m still not entirely clear on is whether he’s talking here about personal value or he’s talking about like a business value. Because I’ll tell you where this really resonated for me before I read the book when I just saw Kobe’s introduction to the book. It resonated for me because when he talks about these five kinds of value, so he talks about personal value. He talks about tangible value. He talks about emotional value, service value, and relationship value. These this really resonated for me because I started my career selling advertising, which is famously the least tangible product. You know, you don’t get anything. What you see is your logo and some text on a page is what I was selling effectively back in the mid nineties. So we’re all very familiar with this idea of. Here’s what I want to say. The way I think about this value business market, product value exchange situation is, is that very often people really don’t understand the value that they deliver. And this is what I’ve always told people when I’ve taught people or when I’ve been thinking about this value is that value is essentially in the eye of the beholder, which is something also that Mark alludes to here.

Martin Henley: [00:18:19] So if you want to understand the value of the product or service that you are providing, then you need to speak to your customer because they understand the value, because they continue to exchange their money for the value that you provide. So there’s no secret here 100%. There’s no secret. And I thought that’s what this book was going to be about. So when it comes to adding value, who is Mark interested or what is Mark interested in adding value to? Well, we know from the cover that this is business and personal like. So how? Maybe the question is how do you get more value out of life? How do you add more value to your life? Which is probably a much more interesting question than the question I have, which is how do you deliver more customer value for your customers? But I think they are two quite different questions, and I think Mark is answering both of these because how do you get more value out of your life is only a hop, skip and a jump away from how do you deliver more value? Maybe I’m understanding this for the first time now. So in leadership, for example, what we might want to talk to people about before if they want to be much more effective leaders is we want to talk about their personal leadership, like are they managing themselves effectively? Are they setting the example? So I think any sensible conversation in leadership in 2022 starts with a question of your personal value.

Martin Henley: [00:19:47] Like what value are you adding in the world? What value are you taking out of the world? Maybe this is how I understand it. So neither of these like personal value or professional value aren’t a million miles apart. But I feel like it kind of got lost. So what I’m interested in is my very basic question How do you add more value? And if you are interested to understand how you add more value, if you’re a marketer or a salesperson, you need to think about these five different value. I want to say propositions, but they’re not propositions elements. These five different elements. So there is a personal value. There is a tangible value. There is an emotional value. There is a service value, and there is a relationship value. So where this makes sense literally for me. Is where there’s this value exchange going on. So if, for example, somebody is telling you that the product that you’re trying to sell them or the service you’re trying to sell them is too expensive then. The only way that really makes sense or the only way that is a game show stopper is if they’re actually saying to you, your product’s overpriced. I’m not seeing the value. So the question then is how do you as a business add value to that product or service And you can do it, I think, through the personal, tangible, emotional service and relationship.

Martin Henley: [00:21:17] So the reason this resonated for me to come back is because what I never realized before or what I always knew but never knew. You know, like a penny never dropped is that I am a relationship seller, that what I want to do when I go into a business relationship is make friends with people and offer them that relationship. And I’ve said this a lot when I’ve been selling. I’ve always wanted to be thought of as that mate that is an expert in providing that product or service. And so this goes back to the very first thing I was selling. When I was selling advertising. What would happen is you would spend four days out of the week basically marketing, speaking to people who could possibly buy advertising in your magazine. But what happens then is the magazine goes to print every Thursday evening, so you need to have filled those pages. So what we would develop is what we call the channel list. And a channel list essentially is a cheap advertising list. So at the end of the day, if you hadn’t managed to sell that advertising for a premium, you would have well, you would build the list. So it would have as many people on it as you knew and you would have some kind of understanding with those people. I’ve got a quarter page. I need 150 quid.

Martin Henley: [00:22:36] Do you want it kind of conversation? But before you have that conversation, you say, Hello mate, how’s your week going? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Glad you’re doing well. Listen, I’ve got a quarter page, an 850 quid. Do you want it? And they would say yes or no. And this is essentially how you would close up that magazine. Now, not only me, but everyone on our table, there were six people to a table. We all had relationships with people who buy advertising. And this is the mechanism of how it works. And I’ve done this since then and I’ve done this forever, is I have made friends. My best customers are those customers that have been not my best friends in my life necessarily, but best friends in my business. So I’ve played golf with people. I’ve been to world Cup finals with customers, I’ve been on fishing holidays with customers. So what I realised from this is that I am a relationship seller, but don’t stop there. So I realised something about myself because it’s really important to think about what value is and what value is made up of. And this is the best. I’m not reading enough, so I don’t know if there’s more. I’m interested to read more on this subject, but this is the best demonstration that I’ve seen that there is actually more to value than what lots of sales people think there is. So lots of sales people turn up and they’ll be told it’s too expensive.

Martin Henley: [00:24:06] And then the salesperson will think, Well, I’ve failed. I’ve failed on the very basic tangible value mechanism, like really a business should have done this. Like if it’s costing you £800 to get this done and we can get it done for you for 400, there is the tangible value like save yourself half your money as the tangible value. But but salespeople think I think that if they if somebody says it’s too expensive, then they’ve failed to communicate the value or they’re failing to deliver the value for what they should be thinking. And this is why they should read Mark’s book, is they should be thinking, how can I add value to this product or service so that it does make sense for these people? And the answer is in this book, the answer is in developing personal value, i.e. understanding their motivation, i.e. understanding what it is that they need to achieve in their lives and supporting them to do it. So add that personal bit of value because ideally you wouldn’t be speaking to anyone about selling something unless there was something they needed or wanted to get done. So support them to add value personally for themselves, the emotional value. So this may be is what really good marketing is about, is tugging on your heartstrings a little bit or tugging on your desires a little bit to make you want that thing that little bit more. And if you believe Mark and I believe everything Mark says, then that is about developing these powerful stories.

Martin Henley: [00:25:39] Because stories are emotive. There is data that says that people respond to stories like we respond to stories in the same way, like our heart rates will go on a similar journey when we’re listening to stories. So develop stories and offer innovation, service value, like what is the service around? And this might be something very basic, like how long is it going to take us to get this product to you? Or what color is the product going to be or what is the guarantee look like? Or who do I speak to if it doesn’t go quite well? This is the base way that I think about service, but you could be offering service in your sales relationships by becoming the problem solver, by becoming more expert at the things that you are providing. And then the last thing, the last way that you can add value is, is through this relationship. You know what? You’re my mate. And if you have an issue with anything that I’m doing here, then you have my direct telephone number. And if anything comes up that I think is going to be really good for you, I will be making sure you know, and if I have tickets for a World Cup final, then, you know, you’re on my list of people that I will call maybe the inverse of the list that went on before.

Martin Henley: [00:26:51] So the delight of this book, this book is an absolute delight. I need to be better at reading, I think, to get more value from it. And I will be doing that. I will be getting better of value reading and I will be reading this more. But the delight of this book is that it goes beyond where 98% of sales people stop, 98% of sales. People say they’ve said it’s too expensive, I’m not going to sell it to them anymore. And I think what you need to do is you need to say, okay, how can I develop this value proposition? So it starts to make sense for these people. And the first way you can do that is by understanding what they want to achieve in their lives and supporting them to achieve it. I think this might be the worst book review you’ve ever heard. I don’t I might have done a book review at school. I’ve Googled how to do a book review, and I’m still none the wiser. It brings us to the question, Should you buy this book? But before you get to that question, there’s a there’s an earlier question, which is should you, if you are in business, be thinking about value? And I think all day, every day, if you are in business, whether you own a business, whether you’re a manager in a business, if you’re marketing a business, if you are doing sales within a business, you should be thinking about value all day, every day.

Martin Henley: [00:28:13] You need to laser focus. And I’m not sure that still that this is what this book is about. It’s not. It’s much deeper than I’m able to comprehend at this time. But you should be thinking about that exchange. You should be thinking, I am in the world to develop a to deliver value. And the test of me delivering that value is the market, exchanging that value for their money. That’s the way you should be thinking. And I think you should always be thinking, How can I increase the value that I deliver in the world now? How can I increase the value that I deliver to my customers? How can I guarantee that that value is delivered effectively every time so that every customer gets the same benefit? So if you’re producing software, it’s like, how can I ensure that that actually gets used and that they use the functionalities that are most useful to them in their situation and they do it across their business so that they extract the maximum value from it. So the answer to the question should you be thinking about value is 100% all day, every day. You should be thinking about value in your business. And then that makes the second question Should you buy Mark Carter’s book and read it three or four times and understand it better than I do? The answer is 100%. Yes, I am a little bit in love with Mark Carter.

Martin Henley: [00:29:31] What we will do is we will put we’ll put a link to the book so you can go buy that. We’ll put a link. He’s done TED boxes. He’s got like video all over the place. So there are easier ways to start consuming. Mark Carter So we’ll list those below. But here is my recommendation. Start thinking about value. Start thinking about value seriously. Get beyond the tangible pounds and pence cents and dollars. This is the value that I offer and get into the personal and the emotional and the service and most importantly, probably the relationship. Make friends with your customers and make sure that if they are facing challenges in their lives, you’re the person that they pick up the phone to because you’re the mate who is the expert at resolving those kinds of issues for them. So I don’t know if this has been interesting or useful. If it has, please take a second to like share, comment, subscribe, all of those good things that will give us the motivation to continue. And this is going to happen every other Wednesday. I’m going to review stuff. I’m trying to keep it positive because there’s a whole load of stuff that is an absolute bag of that. I’m going to I’m going to review so you don’t have to waste your time and your money on those service providers. But you’ll see me here every other Wednesday with some kind of review and I will look forward to you being here. Thanks for being here today.

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