Chapter 1

1. The 5 Steps of the Undefeated Marketing System

In 2000, I felt like I had the fate of a presidential election in my hands. To be clear, that’s not where it should have been. I was a 25-year-old kid with little marketing experience who was working for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign as a political fundraiser. I wasn’t exactly “fate of the nation” kind of material.

During the last few weeks of the campaign, it became clear that New Mexico was going to be a battleground target state, so the campaign flew me out to Albuquerque to help mobilize voters. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly logical move. All hands on deck, right? Except that’s not what the situation looked like once I was on the ground.

When I walked into campaign headquarters, the guy in charge immediately said, “Hey Phillip, nobody has been doing anything in the southern half of the state of New Mexico. So why don’t you get a car and go down to Las Cruces and help us get out the vote?”

Oh, sure. No big deal. I’ll be responsible for mobilizing votes across the entire southern half of a key battleground state. No problem.

But we really didn’t have another option. I was this guy’s option. So I moved to Las Cruces and lived out of the Hilton hotel. During the day, I ran a phone bank where volunteers gathered to call undecided voters to tell them they should choose George W. Bush over Al Gore. When I wasn’t on-site, I was organizing groups of supporters to knock on the doors of high-propensity voters. We needed to give the campaign a personal touch, and that meant getting face-to-face with as many voters as possible.

Then, 4 days before the election, the media broke a shocking story about George W. Bush. When he was 30 years old, he had been arrested for a DUI.

If you read Fire Them Now, you’ve heard all the gory details about how I learned this information. I was backstage at an event in Las Cruces with the vice presidential nominee, Dick Cheney, and his aide when the news broke, and we all circled around the TV monitors in astonishment. Cheney was just as aghast as everyone else; he hadn’t had a clue about the DUI. We knew that all hell was about to break loose.

If New Mexico had been an “all hands on deck” situation, suddenly all those hands were dashing back to DC.

Even though it was mere days before the election and I was in charge of a huge chunk of a battleground state, I went with them. Nobody said a word. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Three days later, New Mexico citizens cast 573,200 votes, and George W. Bush lost by a heartbreaking 366.

Of course, Bush still ended up winning the presidency, but it was a nail-biter that came down to a Supreme Court decision because the results were too close to call. I was on the recount team in Florida when the recount finally ended, and I saw firsthand just how slim the margins actually were. They never should have been that close.

States like New Mexico were a big reason why they were. Before that weekend, Bush had a slight lead, but after the news broke and we hightailed it back to Washington, that lead dissolved.

I had left when it mattered most.

That was another defining moment for me. With political campaigns, the most important thing you can do to win over voters is form a personal relationship with them. Knock on their door. Shake their hand. Have a conversation. Maybe my team and I couldn’t have found 366 votes in those final 3 days, but damn it, I could have found something.

I learned my lesson. I said, “I will never, ever leave any stone unturned. What do I need to do to make sure this never happens again?”

After years of research and experience, here’s my answer, and the principle I’ve staked my entire business on: look at your research to find truth and fact. Find out what people really care about. Figure out what’s going to move the needle. Design your approach entirely around that empathetic connection. See what works, and then run with it and see it through until the end.

If we had done that in New Mexico, we might have had a chance at scrounging up the votes Bush needed to win the state. Before the DUI scandal, we were successfully connecting with voters. But when shit hit the fan, I skipped town. I was being reactive instead of following our data-backed strategy all the way to the end.

I’m taking you behind the curtain because I want you to learn from my mistakes. The 5 steps that we abandoned in New Mexico and that could have led Bush to victory there are the same 5 steps that can help you grow your business even more. Let me introduce you to them now.

Meet the 5 Steps of the Undefeated Marketing System

Even the most successful companies can hit painful roadblocks if their marketing isn’t done right. That was the lesson an 8-figure national pest control company learned the hard way.

This 3-decade-plus company had taken a $5 million business to a $20 million one with a single marketing idea. After experiencing a decade of consistent revenue and profit growth, they had even become one of the top pest control companies in America. They thought they were at the top of the world. But suddenly, something changed. Sales flatlined across the board, and they started losing customers.

This is a business owner’s worst nightmare. And the worst part? They had no idea what happened or how to fix it.

They had an annual 7-figure marketing budget with a well-known national marketing company, but they still weren’t having enough success converting sales. Before long, their competition started eating into the market share, and they watched the value of their company drop from $20 million to $18 million. They were bleeding money from all directions.

Needless to say, they were at their wits’ end. And who could blame them? Can you imagine spending 7 figures a year without seeing returns? Not only that, but spending $1.8 million on their marketing and still seeing valuation declines?

That’s when they came to me. It was my job to play Sherlock Holmes and figure out why this booming company was now losing out on conversions. By guiding this client through each step in the Undefeated Marketing System, we were not only able to stop the bleeding by identifying what was causing these losses, but we were also able to develop a solution that put them back on the path of steady growth.

Step 1: Take a Deep Dive into Your Target Market Customer/Client Data (3 to 4 Weeks)

Every successful marketing campaign is built on a firm understanding of who your customer is, what motivates them, and what they value.

For example, if you’re a food product company, you need to know whether your customer base is mostly moms or bachelors. Are they looking for organic food or quick, convenient food? Or somewhere in the middle? Are they more likely to buy in bulk? How much time do they spend online, and are they LinkedIn addicts or Pinterest lovers?

In other words, you need to know who your customer is—and what they value—before you even consider spending your marketing dollars on a bunch of unproven tactics. And there is only one way that a company can truly get to know their customers: by taking a deep dive into customer data.

Let me explain what I mean. If you’re a company with thousands of clients, you can’t go to each person individually and ask them their name, age, hobbies, what they had for breakfast that morning, how much they spent on their car, what they watched on Netflix last night, and what scent of candle they burned in the bathroom last Tuesday when they were taking a bath. Even if you could do that, you shouldn’t. It would be downright weird.

Still, if you’re a company looking to reach your target market, all that information is indispensable. The fact that your customer regularly buys candles might tell you that they value self-care, or if they regularly buy lavender-scented products, it might suggest that your cleaning products company should consider a lavender-scented line.

The smallest details can still carry a heavyweight marketing punch.

The more information you have on your customer, the more insights you have into what they like and value. This not only benefits your business, but it also benefits your customer. It allows you to develop a stronger, more empathetic connection with them and more directly address their needs.

Actually, this is the problem right now in our society. Most businesses, influencers, and everyone else in the marketing game are screaming “me, me, me.” They’re not thinking about others. They’re thinking about how people can like them. They’re thinking about how “popular” they are or how “popular” they want to be. They’ve got it all backward.

Stop thinking about yourself. Stop talking about yourself. Look at what the customers want and deliver it to them. The most successful marketing is empathetic. It puts the client or customer first.

Just like a political race is mostly about the voter, and less so about the politician, successful corporate marketing is all about the customer or client....