PGE Assessment Overview (Public)

All right, so in this video, I want to walk through this initial, assessment that I've put together here.

this consists of a bunch of pages here, a, bunch of sheets in Google sheets.

And and I'm going to walk you through how everything's laid out, so that you can kind of get up and running and and fill it out correctly.

So this first page here is a bit of a kind of like, baselines, benchmarks, kind of, assessment right here.

And so we've got sales, and then we've got marketing.

And within marketing, we've got email, podcast and YouTube and social media.

So starting off on the sales side of things, you can see up here we've got these two, columns here.

This apply to Every, every line item here.

So you got your targets and your current.

And what I'll have you definitely do is fill out all of the current kind of baselines.

And so looking at annual revenue, and so let's say we're at 200,000 a year.

This will break it down into the monthly revenue.

Here we are looking at revenue, just to clarify, not profit.

so looking at top line revenue.

So break it down into monthly, and then this depends a little bit on your business, how you think about this.

I like to have customers as well.

And so we can see that, you know, if we're doing 200,000 in revenue with 25 customers, we can see, oh, that's an average customer value of $8,000.

And that gives us some useful information.

That's a very different business than one that does it with 2,500 customers a year.

And so it's just an 80 average customer value.

And so whatever, however you think about this, whether this is clients or customers or some mix of both, put this into here, whatever number makes sense to you.

And this would be like paying customers a year.

So I would include in that if you have like annual recurring membership customers, they might have signed up three years ago, but they're still a customer now, they're still paying the annual fee.

And so we still want to include them in here.

This is not necessarily new customers, this is overall people in your paying ecosystem.

So let's just say we're at 250 customers a year.

And so we got the average customer value of 800.

So that'll put it in there.

if you do sales, actual sales calls or sales conversations, if that's the way that your sales process takes place, then we'll want to put in here inquiries, and then actual sales conversations or calls and then the conversion rate.

And so let's just say you have a system where you send out emails regularly and in the PS section you have something that says, hey, if you want my help with this, reply with you know, this phrase and I'll send you more information.

So if you get 20 people a month who respond to that email or one of those emails, you've got 20 inquiries.

Of those, maybe only a third of them are really, you know, relevant to your offer.

So you have a quick back and forth and they're like, oh, you know what?

Actually, you know, they might say I'm not actually a fit for it.

Once you send a bit of information or or you might say, actually you're not quite a fit.

Check out this other thing instead.

So let's say it's 30%.

so that turns into seven actual fleshed out conversations, whether that's back and forth in DMs or email or a sales call, however you operate your sales process.

And then you might say, okay, my conversion rate is 50%.

And let's just be generous and say well let's, let's we'll put it in as 50%, because I have it formatted as a percent so we don't need to even do the rounding and the math.

So this will give us a sense of kind of where things are at.

These are all averages.

Average increase a month, average sales conversations a month, average conversion rate.

Obviously there's going to be outliers.

Now on the email side of things.

we'll put in, you know, your starting list size right now, how many emails you are sending your list on average per month.

and this can include newsletters, sales emails, any other type of communication you send to your list.

Just how many emails are you sending, to your main customer or audience.

Should not say customer segment, your main audience segment in your email, service provider.

and that can go in there.

You can put in your average open rate on your emails here and your average click through rate.

And then we get into podcasting.

And so we've got the average downloads per episode in the first 30 days.

So this is at an episode level and so this might be, you know, for your show.

It could be let's say 350 downloads an episode after 30 days, your monthly downloads.

This is across your whole show.

And so you could release you know, four episodes a month.

Then you might also have a hefty kind of back catalog, number of downloads.

And let's say you're getting three thousand downloads a month or something like that.

This is across your whole show, all episodes, new episodes, old episodes, everything in there.

in Spotify we've got a number of statistics here that you can put in.

So we've got the impressions per 30 days.

So this is in the Spotify discovery tab.

I'll have a separate resource source, to be able to show you how to find this information if you're not familiar with that.

and so we've got the people reach.

This is also in the Discovery, tab.

Interested streams, all of this stuff.

Again I'll walk through in a separate resource here.

And then your followers, Apple Podcasts again I'll make a separate little thing here but looking at followers, listeners over the past 30 days, engage listeners over the past 30 days, plays over the past 30 days, time listened and average episode consumption.

and so again I'll offer a supplementary resource to walk you through where to find each of those points, dates, data, points if you're not familiar with those.

And then if your show is on YouTube, you can put in YouTube subscribers, average video plays, average video click through rate and average view duration.

Got all of those here.

And then your social accounts, if you are on social, if not, if you're not actively pursuing growing any accounts and you're not active on them, just leave these blank.

If you are focused on one or more, you can put your, your to here.

and so that's going to be all of your kind of current baselines here.

If you have targets for any of these things, put them in, otherwise leave them blank.

And so essentially I want to know what you are actually measuring and aspiring towards in your business.

And so you might have a goal of saying well I believe we can do 500k in business, in total revenue or annual revenue.

And so that's one of the things that I am aiming towards and, but also I only want to work with hundred customers a year.

I actually want to boost the average customer value significantly.

This tells me a lot about your goals that we're actually looking to do something very different than just get more customers to get to this number.

It's actually we probably want to make more while working less or maybe it's working more with this smaller number of people.

we can also look at if you have goals to increase the number of inquiries or conversion rate or sales conversations.

this will all give me some information if you have goals around these things, email the size, obviously if you want to send more, you want to send less, whatever that might be, you have open rate goals, and so on and so forth for all of these.

Now one thing I, I, I mentioned, if you don't have actual existing goals around these things, please leave them blank.

And the reason for that is I want to know what are we focusing on here?

And it's easy to say to look at all of our baselines and just say well I want it to be better than that and just put in all numbers that are, are better than the current baseline, which is probably something we do want to but if that's not our focus, we want to know what are the most important things that we're focusing on.

And then we'll figure out which of these downstream or upstream things I should say, do we need to focus on in order to move the needle in that way.

So only put in your targets if you actually already have these things and they are defined kind of like these are the major things I'm looking to influence in my business.

All right, so that's the initial metrics, page here.

Then we get into the rest of the pages which are all laid out the same.

They've all got this kind of 1 to 10 rating along the top.

and for each of them we can see down the the left hand side here, there's a series of different kind of components or categories.

And then each of them has a description, which aligns with the rating at the top.

And so for each of these, I'd love for you to go through, give yourself a rating from 1 to 10, whatever it corresponds with here.

And so if we can think about, you know, right here, the, the six here or the three or the nine, these are all kind of like bang in the center of these descriptions.

And so this description perfectly describes you.

and then if you're, you know, well, I'm not quite at that level, I'm a little bit lower, but I'm not so low as this.

You know, it can be a five or it's a little bit higher.

On the higher end of this it can be a seven and you kind of get the picture.

So I'd love for you to go through, give yourself the rating 1 to 10 on each of these and then a one or two sentence description of your current situation, how you feel.

and hopefully these descriptions give you a sense of like what we're looking for here, what good looks like and what not so good looks like.

And so that you can kind of give me a little bit more information about where you're at in relation to these things.

And this will be hugely valuable to me, in going through and kind of getting more information about your business, and understanding kind of like where you're at with everything here.

So going through these, you don't need to spend, you know, many hours on all this, but going through and giving me enough information that I can actually work with this is going to be very helpful for both of us.

and essentially we've got four different pages here.

And so as we can see here, we're working on the foundation one right here.

And so we've got things like, you know, how clear on your, are you on your overall brand strategy, how clear is your positioning?

Or how clear are you on your positioning?

And I guess, how clear is your positioning to, potential customers?

And the thing to note here is this is not necessarily just for your podcast.

This is for your overall, market.

And so there are probably other people offering similar things to you in the market.

They may not all have podcasts, but we want to know how clear is your positioning from whoever your competition is for your customers, or clients.

And so that's what we're, we're thinking about with PIPS positioning here.

the point of view, this is really the centerpiece of, of so much of your brand and marketing is, is what is your point of view?

What, how do you diagnose the problem that your people have and what is your, solution that is distinct and different from what other people are offering?

This is kind of what we're talking about with the point of view.

We've got several exercises that will really help you clarify this.

IP is really focused on things like frameworks or branded phrasing and terminology, stuff like that, rubrics and whatever else.

your audience kind of identification, like, how clear are you on who your audience is?

And can specifically kind of point to that.

And specifically here I should actually rename this as customer ID more so.

And I'm actually even going to clarify that further and say, ideal customer id, we don't really care about.

Just there's always going to be segments of customers.

Some are a better fit, some are less of a fit.

We want to know really specifically who are the best clients for us so we can find and attract more of those people.

And then reputation in your industry.

And so this is really looking at it on your reputation, on three dimensions.

And so it's how broad is your reputation, how far reaching is it?

It's how deep.

Do people have a really strong positive association with you that's really entrenched?

And then is that aligned with the reputation that you want to have, which is often actually not the case.

People might think of you, as something that you outgrew or that you used to do but you no longer want to be known for, and so on.

So this is the foundation side of things.

on the sales side of things, we've got an assessment of your offer.

we've got an assessment here looking at your kind of existing sales system.

So do you have a defined process for how you create customers out of your audience.

how often are you selling and making offers to people?

Is this something that happens once every three months?

Or is this something that happens pretty much like clockwork, every week in some way or another?

and this, the one thing I'll say here is this is kind of actual dedicated sales offer.

So it's not necessarily just like a ad in your podcast.

It is a defined email that you send, a specific email that you send to people, or a post on LinkedIn that is a direct sales kind of post.

And so thinking about this in terms of, the sales or offer frequency, looking at your email marketing system and where you're at there, do you have case studies and other forms of proof that your system, your method works?

And then attribution, Looking at, do you have a way to track and identify where do customers come from?

How, how does somebody become a customer?

Where do they enter my ecosystem?

What are the things they engage with along the way, and then what ultimately gets them to buy?

So all of these things are things that we will address, in more depth.

but this will give us a benchmark for, you know, where are we at right now so we can focus on what are the things, what are the roadblocks, what are the bottlenecks that we can work through here.

And, I will say too, that actually for both the sales and for several of the other things, there's even deeper assessments that we'll be able to really pinpoint the specifics when we get to that.

Specifically looking at the sales system and also the offer or the product, I've got a whole similar rubric to this that will lay out basically all the things that a great offer has, that we'll be able to look at this in much more depth.

but we'll save that for when we actually get to that.

And if we identify that the product is somewhere, that there is room for improvement.

All right, on the exposure side of things.

So first we're looking at audience access.

And so do you have a way to, you know, do you know where your audience, and your best customers hang out right now?

Podcasts, they listen to, communities that they're a part of, newsletters, they subscribe to, people that they follow online, so on and so forth.

That's, obviously the first part of, of getting in front of those people is knowing where they already are.

number two is exposure frequency.

So how often are you getting in front of these new potential customers and audience members, on a regular basis or not, the Quality of exposure.

And so there's a difference here between like auto posting one post to all of your social platforms without changing it at all, versus taking the same core idea and then crafting that into a post that feels native to each platform.

And so the LinkedIn post looks different from the threads post looks different from the X post looks different from, you know, your email that you send out.

That's all the same content, but each one has been kind of tweaked to feel at home on that platform.

Given that platform's conventions and trends and expectations.

That is much higher quality.

Exposure is more likely to get people to take action than something the lazy kind of auto post the same thing everywhere, which is almost guaranteed to be ignored.

number six is the capture mechanism.

And so once you're getting awareness, do you have a strong, compelling way to get people either to follow your profile, do you have some kind of like, premise around your profile?

It could be lead magnets, it could be getting people into some kind of community.

And so thinking about like, once we get exposure, how do we convert that into something where we're going to get repeat exposure to those people?

ideally that we are more in control of and kind of own those platforms.

And then again, tracking and or attribution, do you have a sense, and a system and, or a system to be able to see, okay, I know which activities lead to the results that I want.

Whether that's, you know, growth on a certain audience platform, whether that's email or podcast or social media, or whether that is you know, leading to any other outcome that you're looking to get from your exposure activities.

this could also be one other subtle one here that fits into this is thinking about attribution and tracking related to maybe you are guesting on other shows or doing cross promotions or collaborations.

Are you tracking those things that you're able to see?

Oh, I've guessed it on four shows in this category or around this topic.

And all of those led to a lot of my ideal customers.

I guessed it on four shows on this other topic and it led to no customers.

That's another form of attribution and tracking that we would want to be thinking about as we are doing, exposure based activities.

And then finally our final sheet here is around the podcast itself.

And what I would just say here is if you are having me do an audit of your show, you can ignore this.

I'm going to go through this myself and then I'll ask you to go through it afterwards.

To get your take on it.

but you can ignore this for now.

If I'm doing an audit of your show, if I am not doing an audit of your show, this may be one of the, probably the most important pages to go through, because a lot of the other stuff I can observe pretty quickly.

But a lot of the things in this, that this document goes through here are, you need to know the show.

And so when I do audits, I listen to 10 to 15 hours of a show, typically.

And so I'm able to really get a sense of, like, okay, what's actually going on here?

And I can really, you know, get a sense of all of these things.

Whereas if I don't do that audit, I'm basically taking you at your word.

And we, I mean, I'm not going to be doing audience, research for you in this case.

And so I'm not going to be able to talk to 15 different listeners and get their sense of how the show is going.

And so we want to make sure that you are giving a very accurate description here.

And so going through, I designed this one to be, I hope, very enlightening to you as you go through, to be able to get a sense of, like, what some of the weaknesses are in the show and also then communicate to me some of the places where we need to work on so I can get you the resources.

And so usually if I'm doing an audit, I can quickly see, okay, these things need to change.

And here's all the resources.

we're just going to be doing that a little bit different.

If I'm not doing the audit, where you're going to go through this, rate yourself, really honestly, and then I'll be able to say, okay, so let's talk through this together.

And we can then have a much more, kind of like, focused conversation where you're saying, okay, I read through that thing, and this is where, you know, you kind of mentioned this, and I don't, like, really think I have that in place.

We can then talk about that, and I can get a sense of, like, what's currently happening in the show without having done the audit, and then point you in the direction of the resources and help you build a plan around that.

And so this is, perhaps one of the most important since we are, you know, a lot of our work together is grounded in the podcast for you to spend some serious time on this and just, like, go through these, get a.

Probably, if you were going to give one or two sentences in the other categories, Here it might be helpful to give a little bit more even and talk through how you structure the current show and some of these things.

And this will really help us accelerate things on, the podcast front.

So bit of, free context here for that.

if I'm not going to be doing, doing an audit for your show.

so we'll just talk through these quick here.

Demand validation is essentially, do we know that there is existing demand out there?

Can we see has somebody else built a podcast, a YouTube channel, a Instagram account, an email list, something that is at or larger the size that we expect for ourselves?

And if we don't see that, that is a big, big, big red flag.

usually this isn't a problem, but I've worked with several shows where there is just we cannot see.

They want to grow a show that has 10,000 downloads an episode and we can't find anything, no content that has an audience that is anywhere close to that size.

And so we have to say this audience might not exist.

This may be a very niche audience.

And you could grow a thousand person, or a listener, an audience, listener and audience listener, a show, listener and episode show.

but you're probably not getting to 10,000.

And if that's the case, you could probably still build a great business around that.

But the dynamics need to change, as well.

So demand validation number, two is differentiation.

And so looking at the other competing shows, the other shows, let's say that, a listener pulls up, they put in your search term for your podcast.

Your show comes up along with 19 other shows.

We've got 20 shows on their screen.

And let's just imagine that a listener could, you know, read the one sentence pitch of each show all at once in a spreadsheet.

Does your show have a strong chance of being the one that's picked?

Essentially?

Like, is there a strong differentiation strategy that if they read that sentence, and probably in combination, they also saw the COVID art and title and all these things that express the differentiators.

is your show in the top two or three, which is where it really needs to be if we want to grow.

And so part of that is by creating a quality show, but a bigger part of that is by creating a uniquely kind of different show.

A show that complements and contrasts against everything else that's out there.

There's no easy comparison or, replacement.

And that's the kind of show we need to build if we want to have any chance at growing whatsoever.

So differentiation number two, messaging this, if you have a strongly differentiated show, your messaging should probably take care of itself in most instances.

That's not always true.

You can have some kind of like, obscurely differentiated show, which can be problematic.

But it, is something that sometimes you do get shows that are actually really good, really unique, but they're just hard to message for one reason or another.

And so you could have strong differentiation but weak messaging.

often though, they're quite.

They go hand in hand packaging.

This is really about the kind of things that will.

A, listener will encounter, a potential listener will encounter first that will convince them to give your show a shot.

So we're looking at things like the show title, cover art, the show description, episode titles.

These are kind of the main factors of the packaging, where it's like, these are the things that before somebody ever clicks play, these are all the elements that influence their decision, often in a matter of seconds or even milliseconds.

And so we want to make sure that these look professional, legitimate.

They demonstrate, relevancy to the listener and intrigue.

They look fresh and distinctive from everything else that's out there.

This is what we're kind of aiming for on the retention side of things.

We're first looking at, the format and structure.

So is there a repeatable, consistent, format or structure to the episodes that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of programming?

In things like, emotional or narrative arcs of the episode?

Are there things that, bring up certain conversation topics that are important to highlight that lead to good episodes and highlight your key messaging points and things like that?

this is something that we'll talk a lot more about.

It's a huge and underrated, part of podcast growth, because it leads to, or it reduces churn, essentially.

And so the more people, we, we want to get more people into the show, but we also need to keep those people listening to more than one episode once they do.

And having a consistent format and structure both makes it easier to create great episodes and also allows people to develop.

There's this very, academic phrase called rhythmic attachment.

and this has been coined, I don't know if this was coined by people studying podcasts, academics who, like, literally, they are podcast academics.

but there's this idea that this is of the things that gets people to come back to podcasts, is that there are these repeated kind of structures and loops that every episode, you know, you're going to get these things.

And the content, the subject matter is different, but there's still this underlying structure that remains the same and allows you to build an expectation, a kind of it, it, it leads to increased reliability of the show where you just know what you're going to get when you click play, you know how it's going to unfold.

And so it doesn't feel as risky to, you know, dedicate an hour to listening to this show versus one that every single episode is different in some way.

So this is, the structure and format is a huge, hugely, important part of podcast growth and also a hugely important part of sales.

As for reasons we won't get into now.

But yes, definitely something to focus on the value or experience this is really related to, you know, are people getting payoffs so they're, they're investing their time in this thing?

Are they getting payoffs that are worth more than the time they invested every single episode?

one or more.

And so this is really, you know, speaks to the value of, of the show and the experience that listeners have.

And so you can have a well structured formatted show that does not deliver any meaningful emotional or intellectual payoffs.

They're not learning anything new.

they're for a comedy podcast.

Obviously the payoffs are laughs.

And so if you have a comedy podcast that doesn't generate laughs, probably it's not that great a comedy podcast.

Similarly, if you're trying to teach people something in every episode and people, you know, four times out of ten don't walk away knowing anything new, probably that's not a very good educational podcast.

And so this is what we're looking for with kind of thinking about what is the value that the show is promising, what are people coming to get and are we delivering that, you know, at least one or more times per episode in a very meaningful way?

engagement.

This is really around.

Do you have a way to engage beyond the podcast with your listeners?

This could happen through social media, through email, through a community, platform, several other ways as well.

But really, you know, we're looking at, is there two way communication happening?

Connection and resonance.

This is really about you as the host.

Are you presenting yourself in a way that's easy for people to like to build affinity with, maybe even aspire to be like in some way.

and so we're really.

This is about the emotional side of things, the host, audience connection.

And then finally on the sales side of things, we talked about sales previously, this is looking specifically at the podcast is do we have a defined strategy around using the podcast to nurture our audience to become clients and customers.

And so this is, is really, we're going to talk a lot about content strategy and content marketing.

but this is just getting an initial sense, like where are you at right now?

How strategically are you thinking about everything from episode topic selection and guest selection to the show concept as a whole, to the episode structure that we talked about.

But all in the, through the lens of sales of all of these things leading to, you know, the outcomes that we want.

So like, I said the, your homework here is to go through this worksheet, fill out your baselines in this doc, here on the first page, and then score of one to ten in each of these and one or two sentence description here.

And once again, if you, if I am not doing an audit of your show, if you can supply a little bit more information here, that will be really helpful for me because in my experience there have been all, I don't think there's been a single show that I have audited.

I've done probably a couple hundred at this point.

I cannot think of one that did not need to make some kind of changes to the show in some meaningful ways.

Sometimes it's not huge, most of the time it's not huge tweaks.

But there have always been changes that need to be made in order for the show to grow faster or grow at all and to lead to more sales.

And so, the most high resolution way for me is when I do the audits.

But, obviously those are super time intensive and I don't have the bandwidth to do that for everyone.

And so if we are skipping the audit and jumping right into the the rest of the program, the more information you can give me here on the state of your show, the faster we're going to be able to pinpoint the things that probably could be tweaked and worked on.

And we'll start workshopping that to get your results.

So, that is your homework here.

the one last thing that I want to say related to this doc is, the best possible outcome is that you have a ton of low scores.

the reason is that if you think about like, if you score 10 out of 10 on everything and you're still not really getting the results that you believe you could be from your show and your business, that doesn't leave us in a very good place.

It's like we're already executing everything flawlessly, so maybe we've just reached the cap of what's possible for the business, which is, you know, not the ideal place we want to be in.

my assumption is that you signed up because you believe there is more that can, you can get out of your business.

There's more that it can provide, for you.

And so if, if we're going to do that, probably we want to see that there's room for improvement on a bunch of these areas.

And we know, okay, hey, this is why it's not working so well.

And so if you're scoring, you know, twos, threes, fours, fives, that is fantastic news.

It is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about, or discouraged by.

It's actually something to be really excited about because almost like the lower you score, the easier it is to make big moves that start to move things in the right direction.

whereas we start getting to that like 7, 8, 9, 10.

That's like small tweaks and optimizations that will lead to better results, but it's not such big gains.

Whereas the lower we are on the scale, like, there's probably some big chunky things that we can do that are, start going to start getting better results.

So, of course, wherever you are, wherever you score, that's where you're at.

And we're going to work with that and build the plan around it.

but don't be worried if you, you score pretty low on this.

because that's basically where everybody starts.

We all start with zero to zero on, on everything.

And we over years build everything up, up, piece by piece.

So that is it for the assessment here.

I am really excited to see how you rate yourself, how you score and all these things and then putting a plan in place to improve each and every one of them.

All right, talk more soon.

Bye.