89. Schell Gower – ClearMark Marketing Agency

Schell Gower:

I always start with messaging first and making sure that's clear and concise, knowing who your primary target audience is and what is it that they want. What do they need? What is their problems? Then I build a strategy around that, taking into that account of, hey, it's not just that you've been in business for 50 years. It's not just that you have five or six or seven offerings that you can have to serve clients. It's what problem are we solving?

Robert Wagner:

From HoganTaylor CPAs and Advisors, I'm Robert Wagner, and this is How That Happened, a business and innovation success podcast. Each episode of the show, we sit down with the business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens.

Our guest today is Schell Gower. Schell is a marketing consultant and fractional chief marketing officer for multimillion-dollar companies, nonprofits, and startup companies across the US. She is the founder of Clearmark Marketing Agency and has helped hundreds of companies from beauty brands to real estate, tech, and healthcare services with their marketing and digital strategies.

Schell is a certified guide with StoryBrand and is ranked in the top 1% of all guides. She is often called upon by StoryBrand to coach other guides and lead their workshops. Schell has a marketing degree from Harding University and is based in Little Rock, Arkansas. So, Schell, thank you for joining us and welcome to How that Happened Podcast.

Schell Gower:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. So let's just jump in. I mean you talk in your bio a lot about marketing messaging and strategic marketing. Just give us a thumbnail, what does that mean to you when you talk about a strategic message for a company or organization?

Schell Gower:

Well, oftentimes we're out here ... When you own a business, you're out there, you're talking about what you do and who you serve, and you're creating messages that go out on social media and your website and your salespeople.

How I approach it is, first of all, it's important that the message that you're putting out into the universe, that you're trying to recruit people to come in and do business with you, is that it's clear and concise and it's really focused on the customer, which is one of the reasons why I really love the StoryBrand framework and use it with all of my clients, because it really is customer-focused and the needs of their business first. What is the problem that they're trying to solve? Then how do we as the business help them solve that issue?

So often companies talk about how many years they've been in business, which isn't a bad thing, or, "Hey, here's all the products and services that we offer," which, again, great opportunity for you to share what you do, but if you're not talking about the problem that customers have, then really you're just giving them a laundry list of things. We are hit with over 30,000 messages a day. So you just become part of the noise that is out there of people trying to pitch their products.

And so, the way I look at it from a strategic marketing standpoint is whenever I work with a client, and it doesn't matter whether we're just doing messaging for a website or whether I'm working with them as a fractional CMO and really trying to help them build a strategy, I always start with messaging first and making sure that's clear and concise, knowing who your primary target audience is and what is it that they want, what do they need, what is their problems, and then I build a strategy around that, taking into that account of, hey, it's not just that you've been in business for 50 years. It's not just that you have five or six or seven offerings that you can have to serve clients. It's what problem are we solving and do we know how to adequately and clearly communicate that to them so that they choose you over everybody else?

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that's so interesting. So let's just dive a little deeper into that, because it really intrigues me. So let's talk about ... We're marketing. We're not selling yet. So we have just a broad message. We don't even know who our customer is yet in terms of specificity. How can we talk about the problem at that stage of the game?

Schell Gower:

Well, I think that's where you take a step back and you really ... I firmly believe that marketing and sales should talk together. That's really important. As marketers, I think often we are focused or can be focused on, hey, these are the products that we have. Let's talk about them and let's get them out there.

What I have found just in my experience of being on both sides ... I've been in sales, I actually did sales and marketing tracking when I was in college and have worked in sales and marketing in my career. What I have found is when you want to adequately or accurately talk from a marketing standpoint about the problems that customers have, you have to talk to salespeople. They're the ones that are listening to the audience. They're the ones talking about what they hear.

So when we understand ... Pulling the salespeople who are talking to your customers every day, and I can get that information from them, then that helps me understand, hey, we have probably five or six different people that do business with us or choose to do business with us, but there's a commonality between that, what I call, and many people in marketing call, the primary target audience. Who is that primary person that's always going to pull the trigger and do business with us? And so, that's who I want to focus on. Who are they? What needs do they have? That helps us determine the messaging that we create.

So we can talk all day long about what we do, but if you don't understand the problem that people have of that key target audience, then it makes ... You can create messaging and it'll work for a while. But if you're missing the mark on who your primary business model or primary client is, then you're not going to get the results that you're looking for when you're trying to build your business.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. I had this awesome advice, is to go seek some counsel, some advice, some learning from the sales force, people who are out there facing the customer every day. So that's awesome.

So I wanted to ask you about what ... When you enter an engagement, people are obviously ... They've reached out to you because they're struggling with their marketing and their message. What do you most often see? What I've already heard is we talk too much about ourselves and we talk ... Right? So what else is out there? Would you add anything to that?

Schell Gower:

When I do an analysis, what I see ... Well, of course, yes. Often we are talking about ourselves too much, or the messages that we're putting out there. I see two things. So I'll break it down into two parts.

The first thing I see is we do random acts of marketing. What that means is we hear sometimes the marketers that are inside an organization, they're so busy with the day-to-day that they just think in terms of, "I've got to get this social media post out there. I've got to get this email out there. What are our business? Oh, we're slow this month. Okay, let's do an email drip sequence."

They don't always have a strategic plan of what they're going to do. It's just, "Hey, I've got to put out these fires," or the executive team will reach out to marketing and say, "Hey, I have an idea," and they're like, "Okay, sure." They're not stopping to think about, "Hey, that was a great idea, but does it make sense? Well, what is the result? What is the goal?"

Like from a marketing standpoint is pausing when somebody has an idea outside of the marketing team and saying, "Okay, that's a great idea. Let's stick through this. Why do you want to do it? What is the outcome that you're looking to have?" and then, "Is that a great idea, or if we do this, we're going to sacrifice something else?"

So I would say often it's just random acts of marketing without a real plan wrapped around it to be able to support the goals and the vision of the company. So that's one of the biggest things that I see when it comes to creating marketing strategy and marketing planning.

The other thing I would say is that companies look at their marketing and they think that marketing is the problem. "Well, we just need more people top of funnel, where we need marketing to spend more money. We need more ads. We need more SEO."

What I have found when working with organizations ... And because I am so focused on the strategy and really uncovering where the gaps are, not just from a marketing perspective, but what I have found is that the marketing is just the symptom. The marketing is just that thing that businesses often feel like, "Well, I just fixed marketing. I'll add more campaigns. I'll do another ad."

Really, we're just trying to bring people in. Where the underlying issue has been in a lot of organizations I've worked with is the sales team isn't connected to marketing. And so, they don't know how to or aren't closing the deals well. The email sequences that have been developed aren't being used, to follow up, to help take the burden off of sales teams.

There's no structure. There's no organization. There's no systems or processes in place to help make the marketing engine run smoothly.

Schell Gower:

... make the marketing engine run smoothly. And so I would say those would be the two biggest ones is, one, random act of marketing just to get it out the door. And then two is not taking a step back and looking to see, is marketing really the problem or is that just the quick fix kind of solution that we think will fix the problem? And it's more, it's deeper, it's in other areas of the business that marketing just happens to be the, what many think is, "Well, if I just fix marketing, then everything else will fall into place." And that's not always the case.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. I love the phrase random acts of marketing because I can see you make commitments to the organization. We're going to do this, we just got to go do it, or we've got a budget so we're going to spend it. Right? Without the strategy behind it. So let's talk a little bit about StoryBrand. So kind of lay some foundation for our listeners what StoryBrand is and how you use it in your business.

Schell Gower:

So StoryBrand is a seven part framework, and it's really simplifying the elements of story into an easy to follow system that helps you focus on the customer being the hero of their story. And we, as the salesperson, the advisor, the team member that works for a company, we're just the guide. We are not the hero of that story. And as a matter of fact, Donald Miller says this often, where he says, "If you go to a party and somebody walks up to you and says, Hey, what do you do? And you say, Well, hey, I'm a marketing strategist and I help businesses do this. I really love working with blah... And you're just going on and on and on about yourself, that the person on the other end is going to go, Well, that's great for you, but that's your story. I'm excited about your story, but that has nothing to do with me, so great. I'm just going to go on to the next thing."

And so what StoryBrand really does is it helps us really be able to, one, tell our story well and putting us in a position of being a guide to those who need us. And that everyone else is the hero of the story. And so when we position ourselves as the guide, it makes it so much easier for people to, one, open up with what problems that they have, and it helps us to determine I can help this person. I'm the Yoda, to use a Star Wars analogy, because yes, I love Star Wars, but to use, we're the Yoda to Obi-Wan Kenobi, we are the Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker. We are the guide. It's not about us. And then we can determine, "Hey, I can help you." Or, "I can't help you, but I know somebody who can." So that's really how the StoryBrand framework just simplifies all acts of marketing.

When I started my business seven years ago, I was doing marketing and I was helping people with their business, a couple of startup organizations. And when I came across StoryBrand, one of the things that I uncovered was how easy it is for me to better help clients understand how to market their business by using this framework, so it makes it really easy for customers, clients, advisors, anyone really, to kind of think through the lens of, "Hey, if I take myself out of the equation of being the hero to save your business or to save your spreadsheets." If we take that out of the equation, then it makes it so much easier for us to say, "Hey, how can I help? How can I help you? What is the problem that you have?" And then I can give you a solution based on the problems that you have and really understanding, having empathy to really understand where you're coming from, and then giving you an easy way to either do business with us or to work with someone else who can help you solve your problem.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, yeah. I love the whole concept. I've read the book and I do love the concept. It just takes the pressure off of feeling like you're on the spot to deliver this grandiose idea, solution, whatever. And first of all, before you really truly understand the problem, and you talk to doctors, why do they ask so many questions? Because they're trying to get to what really is the problem, so doing that kind of thing. And then just being a connector, just be okay with just being a connector. You don't always have the answers to things, but it's so powerful to connect someone to a problem or to an answer, right? Connect a problem to an answer. So you were in, I think, the very first class of StoryBrand certification. How did that happen?

Schell Gower:

I did, and I will tell... This is my favorite story to tell how I became a StoryBrand guide. I was in the first class April 2017 of the official StoryBrand guide certification. And I had taken some time off from work to have my babies and to get them to school. And when they started going back to school full-time, I really wanted to build a career based on doing marketing and helping people with their business that was more flexible, and so I worked with the local startup community and was doing marketing directors for a couple of startups. And like I mentioned just a minute ago, when you're doing marketing for companies, often we are at the mercy of the idea, the mercy of the C-suite. And so we do end up doing random acts of marketing or just putting out fires, putting out the messaging.

And what I found was the most frustrating was I knew that I needed to have a little bit more authority in trying to convey, "Hey, we are going to do marketing this way. This is why this works. This is the reason why we talk more customer focused, not business. This is how I solve your problem." Because we weren't even talking about the problem necessarily, or the problem we were solving was a legitimate problem, but it wasn't what would drive the most business. So my husband was traveling and he had heard that Donald Miller was coming to speak an executive series at the Memphis Grizzlys basketball game. So they had a series where they would bring in an executive speaker, you would buy a ticket, you would listen to them speak for about 90 minutes to two hours, and then you got to go to a Memphis Grizzlys game.

And so my husband was like, "Hey, we should go to that." And I said, "The guy who brought Blue Like Jazz is talking about marketing?" And so we went, and for 90 minutes, and it was the same keynote, virtually the same keynote that he does now, talking about the StoryBrand framework. And when I tell you I wrote so many notes I was getting hand cramps, I was just... It was like, "Yes, this is the framework. This helps me not only better market for my clients, but it helps me explain to them in a clear way why this works, why this is a better way for us to create messaging and marketing to hit our target audience." And so that fall, they launched just a regular course. And so I took the course that fall, and then I believe in January they announced that you could get certified.

And I basically told my husband, I said, "Whatever Don is doing, I want to do it." And so when he announced the certification opportunity, I just jumped on it and knew that it would help me be able to just, one, be connected with other marketers who understand the framework, which is one of the reasons why I'm still a guide and actually renew this month for my seventh year. Because it makes it so much easier for me to, one, be connected to the community that understands, gets marketing through the StoryBrand lens, and is an opportunity for us all to communicate together and help solve problems for businesses when we get stuck.

But also it has helped me build better marketing, helped me create, helped me serve clients better, and helped them understand how everything that we do from the person who is at the front desk, checking in a patient, for example, to the salesperson, to the customer service representative on the backend, just really understanding, "Hey, this is why we do messaging this way. This is why from top to bottom we are focused on we are the guide in the story." We are not the hero, and our job is to help and serve our clients, our patients, our clients, our prospects in the best way that is for them. And that may be doing business with us, or it may be going in a different direction. And that's okay, because we want to be the guide so that they can be the hero of their story based on how we served them.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. Well, that is so good. So very, very good. I want to just jump into something here.

Robert Wagner:

So I want to just jump into something here. In your bio, you talk about being a fractional chief marketing officer.

Schell Gower:

Mm-hmm.

Robert Wagner:

Tell us, I mean, we do fractional CFO work, we do some fractional HR work, so in your world, what does that look like for a company?

Schell Gower:

So, often, the businesses primarily that I work with have done a great job of building their business. So they have gotten to that multi-million dollar mark, and I call it bootstrapping. They've brought in a marketer that has done the social media, they've helped build their business, and they're getting to this point where they've hit the wall. They know, as the owner, as the executive suite, they have this vision of what their business could be, who they could serve, and they've got a marketing team that does really well, but it isn't necessarily going to get them where they want to be. And so from a fractional standpoint, how I look at it is, I'm not here to take anyone's job, I'm here to help assess where your business is today, where it has been, where it is today, understand where you want to go in the future, and then look at what marketing you're doing now and saying, "Hey, where are the gaps?"

Maybe it's just setting up systems and processes, maybe you've had marketing team that has been doing really well, but they still don't have the leadership capacity to be able to communicate ideas well to the leadership team. Or they started as, I worked with one company and the leadership team in the marketing, they don't have a marketing director, but they have two people. They had two people in the marketing director seat, but both of them, one was a graphic designer and one was the tech person. So they had the skills to lead a team, but they just needed help with, "What do I do when? How do I help this?" So as a fractional person, it gives me the opportunity to set the foundation, which is always what I do. So when I go in, just like I mentioned before, I do all the assessment because I want to see where they are and then help them create a plan to execute it.

And then I like to walk alongside the leadership team and whoever is in those marketing seats to really keep the eye on the ball of the long-term vision and not get lost in the day-to-day. Because so often, even if you have a robust marketing team, they're so lost in the day-to-day that it's not that they forget about the long-term strategy, it's just they feel like they don't have time.

So it's an opportunity for me to reset that on a biweekly basis and really help them say, "Okay, hey, this is good, but don't forget, we need to be doing those things," as well as helping from a leadership perspective, help them rise up and gain that experience and that knowledge and that leadership that they'll need to take the ball when I'm gone. And to be able to run that and see what that looks like and set up the systems and the processes so that they can do that. And I read something just this morning actually about fractional CMO work, and I think all of us from a fractional perspective is you're coming in there, you're not the person who's the day-to-day, you're assessing and keeping the ball moving forward.

But our job is because we're an outsider, and I look at it this way is because I'm an outside person, I'm not stuck with the curse of knowledge, and anything I recommend is not based on any politics or anything that's going on internally. It literally is, "This is working, this is not working. Let's figure out a solution." So they can reach what they want to reach and grow.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that is all so good. I hope that our business owner listeners are hearing that. I mean, to recognize the compelling event in your business, that you've outgrown something, there's something missing, we're buried in the weeds and all of that stuff, I mean, we experience that on other parts of our business as well. And it is so true that the fractional person can stay above what the FranklinCovey people call the whirlwind, the whirlwind of the day-to-day. And you can just not be a part of that and keep the owner or keep the C-suite focused on the long-term goals. So I love all of that. It's very, very good. So just want to touch on another piece of your background and how it's informing your career today. So prior to, I think, the break in your career for kids, you were pharmaceutical sales.

Schell Gower:

Mm-hmm.

Robert Wagner:

And tell us maybe a little foundation of what that is, but then how it's informing who you are and how you approach things today.

Schell Gower:

So pharmaceutical sales rep, and I jokingly used to say I was a legal drug pusher because it's more fun. But for those who may not be a aware, I represented different companies, so Novartis, Pfizer, were a couple of companies that I represented, and you have a pharmaceutical drug that you would go into a doctor's office and talk to doctors about the benefits of your drug and who it can help. And of course, is it what's called unformulary or not unformulary? So will Blue Cross Blue Shield pay for it, or is it an out-of-pocket? And so I went into that field, first of all, several of the friends where I went to church were in the pharmaceutical industry, I had a marketing background, did marketing for years in food service, and then really just wanted to do sales as well. So when I was in college, I did marketing and sales, didn't quite double major, but close, in both of those. And my grandfather owned his own business and was always involved with working with him and sales, and just I love that aspect as well.

Not just the marketing side of it, but just how do you sell, and wanted to get more experience in the sales field. And so after, and I tell people this all the time, I forget, you forget how many rejections, but at the time, back in the late, oh, this is going to make me feel old all of a sudden, the early to late 2000s, it was a very hard industry to get into. And probably it took me almost eight months and multiple interviews to get my first opportunity. But I knew I wanted to do it. I love science, I love how the brain works, I love how the body works. That's always been something that has fascinated me. And so it was an opportunity for me to serve in a different way by carrying pharmaceutical drugs and going and talking. I live in Arkansas, and so I became very familiar with the Delta, which is primarily what physician offices I visited. But it was just a great opportunity to talk about something.

And it's called pharmaceutical sales, I really feel like it's more akin to marketing because you are going out and you're talking about the benefits and understanding the patients, and who are they seeing and why would this be a benefit to the doctors. But it was definitely an interesting time in my life, and did it for about five years and loved it, loved the travel piece of it, loved talking to doctors and patients and nurses, and loved the drugs. The last drugs that I carried were fun for me because they were antidepressants and antipsychotics. So that is a personal soapbox of mine because I carried those drugs and got to learn so much about how the brain works and how chemistry works and all of that. Maybe that's why I'm so focused on marketing and sales talking together, because when I was a pharmaceutical rep, you got these booklets that would maybe be 12, 15 pages long, and it was meant for you to pick which pages to use depending on the conversations you were having.

But for the most part, all of us talked about the same two pages. And the rest of it was like, "Meh, thank you." But it's not really helpful. And so that's where, to me, I don't want to create. Now, in my career, I want to talk to salespeople and understand, "Hey, what is valuable?" And if I'm going to spend thousands of dollars as a marketing to create a piece of collateral for the sales team to go out and sell, I want to make sure that it's what they really need and not have to apologize for these other pages and only focus on one page. It doesn't make any sense. And so really being in the field for that many years with the marketing materials that we had and just how we use them, definitely helps me when communicating across the marketing and sales channels when I work with companies. So it was a great opportunity.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. Well, and I think we're back to random acts of marketing. So there was a team that was making a lot of money, spending a big budget, and it didn't look right to...

Robert Wagner:

Making a lot of money, spending a big budget, and it didn't look right to produce two pages. Right?

Schell Gower:

No, it's not near enough.

Robert Wagner:

Right.

Schell Gower:

We need more.

Robert Wagner:

Exactly.

Schell Gower:

You need more information.

Robert Wagner:

More is more.

Schell Gower:

Exactly.

Robert Wagner:

So one more question. Schell, you've been in business yourself for seven years now, I think, and so as a business owner, what is it an aha or two that you've experienced as an owner?

Schell Gower:

Oh. One or two aha's?

Robert Wagner:

Yeah.

Schell Gower:

I would say when you are a business owner, the hardest part about being a business owner is it's very isolating. There's very few people who understand what it's like to start from scratch, to build a business, to grow a business, to pivot and change. I still am doing marketing, but I've pivoted in how I actually do marketing and serve clients in the past several years, and not many people get that or understand it or why. Even I think about kind of going back to Donald Miller, he was an author and wrote memoirs, and when he pivoted to business, everybody was freaking out, didn't understand, didn't get it.

And I would argue, although his books are fantastic, before he became a business owner and really focusing on helping small businesses grow, what he does now has almost as much, if not more impact on business because of his pivot. But being a business owner is lonely, and so it's important that you have a support team around you that understands that.

My friends, I love my friends dearly. We have been friends for years, decades, but I can't have the same conversations with them that I have with three other ladies that are all in marketing, and we support each other. We help each other grow. We stretch each other in our knowledge of the industry, but also in just how we best serve our clients. And that has made all the difference in the world in my business because I can go talk with them about the problems that I'm having in my business and they will help me. They get it. They understand. And so for me, I would say it is lonely so find some people. Find a network of people in your industry or just business owners in general who get it, who you can talk through issues with because it is the hardest thing about owning a business, but it is also so rewarding, which is why I keep doing it.

Robert Wagner:

That's awesome. I agree. I think having a community is really important and sometimes I think the super competitive among us are just going to shy away from that. It's like, well, these are my competitors. Well, no. There's usually a big enough pie for everyone, and we all need help, so I think that's great advice.

Schell Gower:

I think that was the biggest aha moment for me was when you stop looking at... StoryBrand, there are 600 plus guides in that community, and the successful guides are the ones that are open to share their experience, their knowledge.

Because if we think of it as, hey, there's 600 of us, but I can't serve every single client. I can't always do that. I don't know the experience. I don't have the same experience as someone else who maybe focuses purely on nonprofits. There's different experiences there, but there's more than enough to go around. And so it's that open-hand mentality of if I give and if I serve and if I help, then it may come back to me and that's great. And if it doesn't, at least I've done that piece. At least I've helped someone else. And so there's enough. If we have that open mentality, that growth mentality, there's plenty out there for all of us and we all serve... If we have that in mind, then we all can serve our ideal client and then be able to refer those who were not our ideal client to someone who would better serve them.

Robert Wagner:

Well said, very well said. All right, Schell, we appreciate you being with us. Now, we do have five questions that we ask every guest, so you ready?

Schell Gower:

Oh, let's go.

Robert Wagner:

All right. So what was the first way you made money?

Schell Gower:

First way I made money. Babysitting.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. All right.

Schell Gower:

Non-professionally, of course.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. So if you were not doing what you're doing now, so you're not a business owner doing marketing, what do you think you would be doing?

Schell Gower:

I would be a basketball coach.

Robert Wagner:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Schell Gower:

Hands down.

Robert Wagner:

Okay.

Schell Gower:

Hopefully at the, probably at the middle school to high school level.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. All right. So question number three is what would you tell your 20-year-old self?

Schell Gower:

What would I tell my 20-year-old self? I would say that your journey is not linear, that you are going to have lots of ups and downs, and you're going to make decisions that are going to feel dumb when you're 40, but just be patient because you're only 20.

Robert Wagner:

Right. Very good. What will the title of your book be?

Schell Gower:

Title of my first book, which I need to obviously write. Positivity. It would be something around positivity, positively impacting your world through whatever you do.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. All right. Very good. So last question, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Schell Gower:

I guess I would go back to what my grandfather, who was a salesperson and owned his own business, and he always said, "When one door closes, another one opens."

Robert Wagner:

Yeah.

Schell Gower:

And so just not being frustrated when things don't seem to be going in the direction you want it to go in, and it just seems like a no after a no after a no, that being patient, another door will open and nine times out of 10, it's probably better than the ones that closed.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. Very good. Okay, so thank you so much for being with us. If folks want to hear more about ClearMark or StoryBrand, how can they get ahold of you?

Schell Gower:

Well, they can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm there and starting to post a little bit more on LinkedIn, more so than any of my other socials, or they can reach out through my website at clearmark.io.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. All right. And Schell also does some group activities, some facilitations, and we're going to have her as part of a group here at Hogan Taylor, so I'm looking forward to that, Schell, and thank you so much for being with us.

Schell Gower:

Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in person in a couple of weeks.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, there we go. That's all for this episode of How That Happened. Thank you for listening. Be sure to visit howthathappened.com for show notes and additional episodes. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher. Thanks again for listening. This content is for information purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Copyright 2023, Hogan Taylor, LLP. All rights reserved. To view the Hogan Taylor general terms and conditions, visit www.hogantaylor.com.