189 | From Idea to 7,000 Clients with Demand Metric Founder Jesse Hopps

Do you know the difference between a plan and a strategy? To reach your business goals, you need both. Today’s guest shares a new approach to growth strategy.

As the Founder and CEO of Demand Metric, Jesse Hopps has spent the last 18 years working with senior executives at many of the world's largest organizations to accelerate revenue growth with focused problem-solving. He’s on a mission to help 500 clients earn $500K+/year in semi-retirement doing growth strategy work. He is disrupting what he calls the broken growth model of the Strategy Consulting industry, which is largely controlled by Ivy League firms that are being increasingly questioned about the effectiveness and value of their services.

Demand Metric has served over 8,000 clients including Microsoft, Salesforce, Apple, Amazon, Fidelity Investments, US Bank, Verizon, and many more! 

Building a Marketing Membership

Jesse and his partners grew a community of over 250,000 marketing professionals through SEO content marketing and email. Their goal was to provide a productized version of consulting through research-based, customizable tools. Today they have over 670 templates, including everything from case studies to marketing plan presentations, job descriptions, and CRM assessments. 

A major turning point for the company came when they started content licensing with large organizations, first the American Marketing Association (AMA) and later the Association of International Product Managers & Marketers (AIPMM). Those partnerships put Demand Metric on the map as a credible brand and industry leader. Soon enough, more organizations began to reach out for research reports and custom content.

Plan vs. Strategy

Jesse’s mission is to disrupt the consulting industry by providing more value to the client. His approach is based on the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, which focuses on challenges over goals.

Most business leaders base their strategy on goals: they want to reach a certain revenue number and they have a plan to achieve that goal. But you need a strategy to overcome any potential obstacles on the path to that goal. The first step is to get all the issues on the table that might prevent you from achieving your vision. Then, figure out which problems you need to solve to make achieving your goal inevitable. 

Enjoy this episode with founder Jesse Hopps…

Soundbytes

12:46-13:20
“They taught me that if you’ve got emails and people that are engaged and a good audience, you can monetize this. I had no idea, that wasn’t what we set out to do in our business. It was always a subscription model, working with these associations. I said, ‘What do people pay for that kind of thing?’ They said, ‘We’ll give you $5,000 if you send this email out. I said that’s probably the easiest $5,000 I’ve ever made in my life.” 

24:13-24:39
“Anyone who’s been in consulting knows it can be very lonely if you’re an entrepreneur or solopreneur. So having a group of others, going through building their business, bouncing ideas off of them…We’ve built online communities before. It’s hard to get them really active and a great culture in a community, but this one kind of just took off on its own. I think mainly because there was a common purpose and vision for the group.”

31:03-31:24
“The art of strategy isn't so much about setting big goals and then creating a bunch of disconnected initiatives around hopefully all these things added up will equal us hitting the goal. It's about getting all the issues of why you maybe won't hit that goal on the table and figuring out what would need to be true, what would need to be solved, in order to make achieving that goal inevitable.”

Quotes

“Everything we’ve built has been based on request.” 

“We take theory and turn it into simple, practical tools that are flexible and customizable.”

“There was an alternative way to deliver value to a big company that the big consulting don’t really do. The client taught me that there’s a lot of value in having someone work alongside of them and their team as a coach.”

“I want to disrupt the traditional consulting paradigm. I think the McKinseys of the world have been charging a lot of money for nice-looking plans, but a lot of them fail to get executed.” 

“The art of strategy isn't so much about setting big goals… It's about getting all the issues of why you maybe won't hit that goal on the table.”

Links mentioned in this episode:

Demand Metric website: http://www.demandmetric.com 

Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessehopps 

Connect with Jesse on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessehopps/