3 Ingredients For Business Book Success w/ Jose Palomino
Jose is the founder of Value Prop Interactive, a consulting firm he started over 15 years ago, and the creator of the "Revenue Throughput System", a process that diagnoses the volume and velocity at which a business converts opportunities into revenue. He’s an adjunct Professor of Marketing with the Villanova University MBA program and author of Value Prop: Creating Powerful I3 Value Propositions to Enter and Win New Markets.
In this episode, Jose shares what the “I3” stands for in his book title, and discusses how using these three key ingredients will help you become a more successful entrepreneur and a more successful author. Jose also talks about how he has leveraged his book to grow his business and is able to track over $1M in revenue directly to it.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Welcome to the Published Author podcast where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact. I'm your host, Josh Steimle.
Today, my guest is Jose Palomino. Jose is the founder of Value Prop Interactive, which he started over 15 years ago. He's also the creator of the revenue throughput system, a process that diagnoses the volume and velocity at which a business converts opportunities into revenue. He's an adjunct professor of marketing, with the Villanova University MBA program, where if I'm pronouncing it correctly, I'll say Villanova University MBA program, but as Americans, we'd say, Villanova.
Jose Palomino: Yep.
Josh Steimle: He is the author of Value Prop- Creating Powerful I3 Value Propositions to Enter and Win New Markets. Jose, welcome to the show.
Jose Palomino: Hello, Josh, glad to be here.
Josh Steimle: So first of all, tell us a little bit about your background. Where you come from, how you got into entrepreneurship and business. And then we will get into a little bit of the backstory of the book too.
Jose Palomino: Sure, sure. Oh, great. So, I started my business value prop interactive about 15 years ago, after what had been a 20 plus year career arc, mostly in sales and marketing, mostly in technology. And moving from actually doing technology, hands on software developer project manager, moving into sales roles, and then eventually marketing roles. So that's kind of a classic technology, Silicon Valley kind of story.
Born and raised New Yorker. So, I'm a New Yorker living outside of Philly, as I like to say right now so I’m in the burbs outside of Philadelphia. And one of the things I noticed though, in the last corporate gig I did was with a company called Yankee Group that was a competitor to Gartner and to Forrester. And they sold syndicated market research to large companies, and I handle their IT leadership accounts for the company globally. So, I handle IBM, Accenture, those type of companies. And what really struck me was just how siloed the disciplines of strategy, marketing and sales were in those large organizations. And I said this, there is an opportunity there to do something that synergizes those a little bit better. And I had a vision for that. And that led me to starting a value prop.
Now once I started the company, I ended up gravitating what I have done, over the years, a number of large corporate gigs, to the middle market, small owner led businesses, not purely entrepreneurial, and that they're not startups anymore. They are like 5 to 20 million dollars of revenue. But there the challenges of strategy, marketing and sales were not one of they’re not synergized enough, they were just not developed enough. They just kind of like it's a day-to-day kind of thing. I’m not saying they are a lifestyle business, but they don't have the headspace or the time space to really think big questions necessarily. They're thinking about the tradeshow schedule. For next year, they're thinking about pricing at their biggest customer squeezing him on. They are thinking of maybe hiring one more sales rep to add to the two they have on staff.
So, I love getting into that world. And the work I did to synergize strategy, marketing and sales were really like ideal for that small to the mid-market company where they needed a way to look at things systemically tying those things together. So that's kind of the genesis of how I got to where I am. And that's why I'm very happy serving that market now as a consultant and coach.
Josh Steimle: And so, what is the I3 in your book title? I'm curious about that, "Creating Powerful I3 Value Propositions."
Jose Palomino: Value proposition often gets conflated with tagline. And what we talk about and what I write about and wrote about in the book and while working with clients now, really look at it, we say a value proposition is the true truth of why your offering is relevant to a particular audience to solve a particular problem. But while you may solve a particular problem, for particular audiences, that still didn't differentiate you because they may be other competitors, alternatives for that customer to solve the same problem, they through other means.
So, we say how you have to stand out, you have to have an I3 value proposition. It's three I’s, first “I”, it has to be innovative for that market. So, innovation is very relative. So not everything has to be Apple iPhone innovation level, although we use that as an example in the book at the time, but innovative, you're bringing some new ideas, something fresh to the market. So, when a prospect says how they can solve my problem, and hmm, they're doing it a bit differently than what I've seen before. That catches their attention.
The second is that it has to be indispensable. And we say that utility over time, divided by the hassle factor, meaning anything could be better, but if it costs me too much money or it costs me too much time or if I have to retrain my entire team, so you tell me you have less. Say, I have a proposal generation software platform, but it's going to require six months of training for anyone to know how to use it. That's not indispensable. It's only indispensable if it's relatively easy to take on that new capability. That's the second “I”.
And the third “I” is a more subtle one. And it's inspirational. It's, it's not just new, but it's exciting. Now, that's all relative, right? So, if you've ever seen, you know, if you have, if you have friends who are in some very technical trade, like an electrician, or plumber, for that matter, they might look at a set of pipes and go, “Man, that's awesome.” And you're thinking, I don't know, I'm seeing pipes. I mean, what's the big deal. But in the trade that you market in, especially in B2B is what you're doing the way you're doing it, something that might excite somebody in the space in how you solve the problem.
That elegance, that little bit of wow factor. So, we say the first one to be innovative is to be net-new, indispensable is to be net useful, and inspirational is to be net wow. If you can shape a value proposition to solve a particular problem for a particular audience that has those three elements, you will have differentiated your promise to the market, and actually, grab people's attention in a different way than if you don't do those things.
Josh Steimle: And this is tough work, though, because I'm thinking about some of my businesses, I'm thinking about businesses I work with, like, you take for example, a PR agency, how do you take PR and make it all those things? Because it's such a standard industry, everybody does it the same way, you have to come up with something new and a different way of doing it. And that can be tough to figure out.
Jose Palomino: Or it can be brutal to figure out, but I'll tell you where the hooks are often a little bit easier, especially for smaller companies. I always tell a small company in a very commoditized category, exactly what you're describing, right? So, you're doing something good, you do good work. But we say “You know what, you actually can think about and redesign the service experience to be different. There's no reason you can't do that.” You look at something as common as air travel, right. So, everybody, you know, if you're an airline, that's nothing more commoditized tonight is literally a seat on a steel tube that goes from point A to point B. And if you go on Expedia, most tend to gravitate their fares roughly to the same level, more or less for the same flight miles, Point to Point, no difference there. But yeah, people do find differences.
For example, I won't fly anywhere that Southwest, let me say differently. If Southwest is going where I'm going, I'm on Southwest. Now, how did they do that? Well, they thought through a few things. They said, “Well, how seats are assigned. I wonder if there's anything we can do about that seats are the same seats, right three on one side, three on the other, you still have to get into two doors, it's still a plane with all that that entails.” And yet they found a way to create that queuing system of when you bought your ticket, you get an A ticket, then you get a B, they even let you upgrade for a small fee, not crazy to become an A ticket. And if you're an A ticket, like I love aisles, I can be sure to get the aisle seat no matter what. Or if I'm an A because it's only a 1 through 32 I think it is on most planes. That's a little service dimension, that it was new. It’s innovative.
In fact, it's so innovative. No one's copied it yet, which is amazing to me that the other airlines will do the same thing. It's indispensable because I know when I fly southwest, I will always get an aisle seat. And it's a little the first few times I did it, I mean now it's just normal for me. But it was like this is pretty cool. This is like so easy. Why isn't everyone else thought about this? And you go time and again, you see competitive spaces. Like I'll get to your PR agency idea in a moment. But Disney. I often wonder when I go to any other amusement park with my kids, when they were growing up, I say “Why don't they just send somebody with a clipboard and a camera and copy what Disney does. Like it's just obviously the best in the world. It's not a state secret. You don't need a patented technology to create the lines that work well and make it comfortable for people to wait for two hours to get on a ride.” And yet no one else copies them.
So that's the other thing. That's that it's … think about things that maybe, and I like to ask it this way: What would your customers love if you could do it? So, if you're a PR agency, what does the customer most want? Just whatever that is? And hint, best way to find out is, ask your customers, “Like what would you most want? Let's stipulate for the moment that we are a good PR firm, and we can get you placed in the right journals, periodicals, and so what else would make this a better experience for you?” And they might tell you it's something as simple as well, I would love to be able to see a daily flash report in my email. I don't want to log into a portal, see what it is.
I also don't want vanity metrics, I want to know, I want to tie it back to what actually happened that I get the phone ring or whatever. I don't know all the particulars for PR firms, I know a little bit. I've used them, work with them. But it's not… I'm not a PR firm. But you start thinking about what would delight a customer in the service dimension if you're a smaller company. That is to say, you're not a fortune 500 company, you can, I think find many ways to differentiate in that category of just how you engage, just the engagement. If we stipulate everyone can get the placements. And the other, I've seen this successfully with another PR firm I was affiliated with. The super niched into a sub-sub-sub market. And they went really deep. And that was what set them apart, for their market. And so, I think there are many opportunities to find ways to do that. But it is hard work to go back to your original point.
Josh Steimle: But it's a great suggestion. If you're not sure what it is. Just ask the customer, they might give you a golden idea, right? So, I'm curious, did you apply this formula to your books when you were writing your books as well?
Jose Palomino: Yeah, it's interesting. So, when I wrote the first book, and the one that's still our cornerstone book, Value Prop, I was finishing up my MBA at Villanova and so, one of the things I did is I said, Okay, well, I wasn't sure yet who would be my direct target audience? Would it be corporate, corporate marketers like CMOS? Or would it be owner-operators. Thankfully, I had a lab in my class, my classmates, who represented a pretty good cross-section. So, one of our projects, we had to do some sort of Leadership Project and I asked Professor if I could make my book be the presentation because I wanted to ask them some direct questions about this. And sure enough, I got an hour of airtime with fellow MBA candidates who are from all kinds of companies and walks of life. And I got a chance to really just say, “Hey, what, what is your challenge when you're trying to find or work on differentiation within your companies? And what would help you? And what do you think would make a book interesting?”
So, there was one, a very good friend of mine, who was a number two guy at the number two software company at the time on the planet Earth so just that's as far as I go. But and so I asked him, I said, “John, can I give you my manuscript?” and my manuscript was actually my whole, all my thinking on go to market, including the topic or the chapter or chapters on value propositions. And I gave it to him, it was like a 400 page book, right? And he's a good friend. And he said, “Jose, what part of this do you want me to read? You know, clearly, he wasn't going to read all 400 pages. And it hit me, I said, this is a guy that gets on a plane from like, Philly to Boston, Boston to Chicago, he likes to read a book on that flight. He doesn't want to have to go around the world to read the book.
And so that was really great. And I started confirming that with other folks. And I also interviewed about 100 business leaders in developing the book content, and I started asking questions around the length. And they said they'd rather have something that has a narrow focus on a particular topic that they could get into. That’s not saying they can't read big books, or they can't have like a good to great or something like that. But they find very greater utility indispensability, right utility over time, in something that would focus on one discipline that they could really center in on. And that's what I focus on. So yes, I applied a lot of these principles to my book. Again, it was an early stage, so a lot of it was a lot more experimentation. Early Stage, it'd be a little different than if I was bringing a book to market which I will be doing next year. That I have a broader base to work with. And I can be even more scientific on that.
Josh Steimle: Really interesting, I love how you talk about getting the feedback from your audience there and how the feedback was, "Hey, this books too big, you got to make a smaller book", because that's really valuable. And this has come up with a few other people that I've talked to that there's a market for a book that can be read during an airline flight. In fact, there's even a publisher, they're called, I'll have to go back and get the name. I'll put it in the show notes. But it's like Sense and Respond or something like that. But we'll have to edit the sound, I'll get the name and put in the show notes. But they specialize in publishing books that are short and, on the cover, it actually says this will take 45 minutes to read. This will take 90 minutes to write.
Jose Palomino: Okay.
Josh Steimle: The idea being hey if you're going on a flight, and you know it's going to be an hour and a half, you can grab one of their books, and you know exactly what you're in for in terms of the time that it's going to take to read. And it seems like we're seeing a lot more condensed education in books these days because, I mean, we're all busy and I love Reading. I mean, I read all these books, or I love to read, even big books. But sometimes I'll grab a small book and I'll just say, "Hey, I can just fit this in right now I'm going to read this real quick." And it's just easier to read a short book.
Jose Palomino: It's also, there are books that are actually two books hidden in one. A book that comes to mind as Tim Ferriss years ago wrote The Four Hour Workweek, right? Now, the irony there is he's like the hardest working man in the business, right? But you know, but anyway, he wrote The Four Hour Workweek. And the first half of that book really was inspiring about how to think about efficiencies.
As an entrepreneur, it's a great read. The second half tried to be more of like a handbook on how to do all this stuff. And a lot of that got dated very quickly. The first half is still a very good book, if the first half was its own idea, it would have been a great idea book by itself. And again, Tim doesn't need my advice. He has very successful books. So, what do I know? But that was my takeaway.
And the other one was Blue Ocean Strategy, which came out maybe 15 years ago. And that's very much closer into my space of differentiation. And so, on the first half of the book, very thoughtful around big concepts when they got into the practicum side on the back end, not as useful, in my opinion. So sometimes it's just they wanted to hit, I'm not accusing of anything, I'm just saying it's easy to want to hit. I want a big hard cover from Harvard Business Press, because that feels good, when in fact, what you have is maybe two thoughts, and those would be better served as two segments. And in my opinion, at least, that's the approach I took.
Josh Steimle: Now, when you started your business, did you already have an idea for a book in mind? Or was this something that came up after you already started?
Jose Palomino: No, after I already started. So, the original name for Value Prop, and was G to M group, which stood for go to market group. No one could pronounce it, but it was trying to aim for a shorter URL. And, and you know, the name wasn't useful. Except in my own mind, which often happens with naming things, especially if you're a marketer, you think, "Oh, it's brilliant", but wasn't as brilliant. But the thought behind it was still the right thought, which is how to help people bring things to market, right, really, and always, almost always, in my case, it's going to be B2B. It's going to be industrial technology, that kind of thing.
So, it's those kinds of problems that I help people solve, really fading it out and professional services, again, in that category of thinking through what am I offering to, who am I offering it to, and why should they care? Always answer those questions. So, in that process, I started documenting the whole method of what we did when we work with clients. And that became a very big PowerPoint presentation. It had everything that I could think of that we do.
So, this is stuff that I'm actually doing with clients. Real project work was the gist of it. And that's “Wait a second, this is a book” that turned into the big manuscript that my friend John said, “hey, it's too big.” Okay, so that was the genesis. When I carved out the section I wanted to carve out, this value prop seems to be the real pivotal thought, like you got to get this figured out well. All the other stuff like how you do lead generation, how you do your marketing programs, all of that will change over time, as we've seen, technology changes. And when I wrote the book, social media wasn't really even a thing at that time, right in 2008, 2009, when it came out. But the principles of value prop, hold up, will always hold up, because it's always true about how you communicate with human beings about why they should give you their time and attention.
So, when I wrote the book, I knew the title was going to be Value Prop. Then what happened was I said, “Well, gee, it'd be great if I had the domain name for value prop. But that's a short eight letter domain. How do you get that in 2008, 2009? They were already gone.” And I found that it was unused. But it was it was parked somewhere. And I use the bind service for the name. And I went back and forth and one Sunday morning driving to church, I got a text. And I said, would you take it for 500 bucks? That's pretty good. I said done.
And so, the book now had a hold but then I said wait a second. Maybe this is better for the name of renaming the company and I was doing some other things with a new partner coming on board. And so it gave me a chance to change the corporate structure behind value prop interactive. The book is Value Prop and the domain we go to go to market with is valueprop.com.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. That's a great little behind the scenes there about naming the book and the company and everything. Because that does happen. I actually interviewed somebody this morning, who they came out with a business and a book and everything and they released it. And then they found out that it was trademarked, and they had to change everything that to change the name, they had to change the book title after it was already on Amazon. And so, she had to go through this whole process. And it's tough finding names in available names. I mean, today, having a domain name is kind of like the new trademark.
Jose Palomino: It's the backdoor trademark.
Josh Steimle: I mean, if you can't get a domain name, you can't have the name. Like you can't use the term unless you have the domain name. And so that's the first place we often go is we say, "Well, is it available as a domain name?" And then it's, is anybody using this any other way? And then we go to the trademark thing and say, "Well, is it trademarked somewhere?"
Jose Palomino: And it even gets more challenging. You know, the times you're tempted to say, well, maybe I can get away with a .io or .net, or dot something else. Reality is intuitively people expect to hear the company name, his domain name, is wanting to put it in an expected as a.com. So that's still the dominant thing you still have to plan for. So as exactly right, and you have to kind of, you're shifting all these things all at once, to come up with something you can actually go to market with and help you win.
Josh Steimle: And it's tougher than ever, because there is a limited number of .coms out there. I agree with you 100%. People, they forget what the extension is, and then they just go to .com. So, it does make it tough that way. I've had to do the IO thing, sometimes or .co, and it just kills me to have to do that. But it's hard. Everything's taken these days. So, when you started to work on your book, did you have prior writing experience that you could bring to that, that you felt like I can do this? I can write this book. Or was it terrifying? Or what were your thoughts as you were getting started?
Jose Palomino: Yeah, I mean, at that point in my career, I mean, I did a lot of business writing from reports, to I was a comfortable writer, I guess I could say. I had started my blog at that time. So, I was actually enjoying that process as well, getting finding my voice that way. So, I've been blogging for a long time as well.
But here's the thing, I was raising a family still three kids at home at that time. And I was running a business and I was doing a demanding Executive MBA Program that was of the kind that you sign up for a two-year program. And you get on the bus, you can't get off like there are no partials, right, so you're going. So, it's basically a full course load for two years. And in that process, I get the idea of writing this book right in the middle of that. So how am I going to do that? And I said, “Well, it's got to be away.”
And the first thought I had was, well, let me pursue, let's see if I can get a book treatment, you know, run by a couple of publishers, and I had some contacts. But they all came back consistently and digital, like McGraw Hill, John Wiley, the typical business publishers that I could think of. And he said, Sure, you know, do you have a list an active list with at least 30,000 names on it.
And you see, I had this idea, and maybe a lot of people on this podcast listening for the first time might be thinking as to still, that publishers were like, in the movies that there’s always a movie with a guy get sells a book or something. And the publisher assigns a publicist, and they're going to take care of, and they travel around the country, and you're going on this book tour, and they're paying for everything. And that's, that's naive in retrospect, but I had no basis I didn't know anything about anything, something okay, that and it only to find that none of basically you got to market your own book. And you got to guarantee us like 20,000 books sold, or 10,000 books sell before we even touch you and say, what is it? And I said, well, in what I get is, well, a business, a first-time business published author might get on a 510 $1,000 advance, unless you come from, like your Barack Obama or something like that. Right? But for the most part for regular humans, that's about what they're talking about. As a who owns the copyright.
So, what we do, so what do you mean, you know, for 10 grand, I'm selling my birthright to you. I said, that made no sense to me. And then as I got deeper into it, I realized they hire freelance editors and freelance designers. And the only advantage they had I could think of I said, “Well, you're on Amazon, but I can get on Amazon was you can get on physical bookshelves,” which back in like 2008, looking towards 2010 That seemed like still relevant.
So, I said “Barnes and Noble, Borders, which would be something to get on the bookshelves.” You can't really get there without distribution through a publisher, not practically that I know of. And I said, “Well, that's a big trade-off,” but I said, “I don't know.”
So, I thought about it. And I've done so many projects in my life, Josh, a lot of creative projects, again, in marketing, because the weirdest thing, I'll find myself a book editor, I find myself a book designer. And sure enough, I put together a project team. And then I found through a recommendation, somebody who just graduated Villanova with a 4.0 GPA, a super brilliant young lady.
I interviewed her once at Starbucks. So, here's what I want to do. I want to meet with you. Once a week, on Monday night at 7pm, we're going to go through my master PowerPoint deck. And what we're going to do is I'm going to talk about it, we're going to record it, you're going to transcribe it, but I want you to apply your education and clean it up, I'll give you the final editor on that before I hand it to my editor. And that's how we're working.
So, this way we can get in one hour, you can say a lot of words in an hour, like an awful lot of words. And we had the PowerPoint as the superstructure. So essentially, I had my outline. That's essentially what we did. But I wasn't reading the PowerPoint I was using as launch points. And sure, enough for a year. Our name is Lizzie, wonderful young lady helped me for a year we put together the master manuscript of the whole book before it.
And so, I was able to do everything I was doing in my busy life. One hour, a week, I gave to this project. And I advanced the book every week, a little bit more, and I had a big manuscript. And then the final cut, I cut it out myself in terms of the piece that would become Valley Prof. And then I had an editor I hired, who that was a different profession, he was a book editor. And he done business books, and he edited and cleaned it up greatly. And then I hired a book designer to lay it out.
And then we went through at the time we went to Lightning Source, which is part of Ingram, right. And now we're all on Amazon's KDP. platform, it's just easier. But we took control of that I said, "Okay, this is going to be my best piece. And I'm going to apply the same care, I would if I was doing this for a client." And that was the story. That's how the book came to be.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. And now with Ingram Spark and Lightning Source, you can get onto bookshelves. It's not the same way that a publisher might do it. But you can get that distribution so that Barnes and Noble and such, if you market it the right way, if you talk- I had somebody on before they actually would go to the Barnes and Noble stores individually one by one and talk to them and say, "Hey, I'll come in and do an event and everything." And they would actually stock the book on their shelves. And I think they had gotten it into 20 Different Barnes and Noble. Well, that's different from getting into it into every Barnes and Noble. But you can do that through Ingram Spark and Lightning Source. If your book does happen to take off or something, then it's at least available for them to order the order. They're there that way.
But you know, the traditional publishers, what I'm seeing is that I have had people on the podcast who have said, I went through a traditional publisher, and I'm glad that I did because they helped me make it a better book. And I think there's value there. Now there are other people who say, I can make it as good as it needs to be. So, I don't need a publisher in both ways you can respect that.
The other value I've seen is for people who are so busy, there's no way they're ever going to get it done on their own. But they have enough of an audience that a publisher will come in and do the heavy lifting, do the work for them. So, I can see like if you're famous, and you've got the money and the time, or you've got the money, but not the time in a publisher will come in and say “Hey, we're going to make this easy for you. And we're going to do all the marketing.” We actually will do the marketing, which most of the time, they won't do that. I can see that.
But I think we're approaching the day where the only people that will make sense for to go with a traditional publisher are going to be celebrities and blockbuster personalities where the potential is huge. And you kind of see this with the music industry as well that the people who are making who are going with record labels and such, it's the blockbusters, it's the people who are the fat part of the animal, then there's that long tail for the long tail. It just makes sense for people to manage these things themselves.
Jose Palomino: No, absolutely. And, you know, the way I tackled it, and I demystified it for myself this way, I said, this is a project and many of your listeners who are professionals who offer business services, and so they, it's the project, so think of it like a project, it has a punch list, there's a set of activities that need to be done. Quality is everything. So, you have to make sure you're comfortable that going out with your name on it, right. It's the ultimate business card.
And that's really been the utility for me, Josh, I mean, I've gotten business from it. I'm not going to say I've made a ton of money on it in the way that like a Harry Potter or else you know, be a different conversation. But absolutely one of the best things I've ever done for my business life. It's something I'm proud of Because I think I actually gave it a lot of attention, I was careful with everything I said was my best ideas that I could put forth into the world. And it gave me a way to have something with authority. So, when I meet a prospect, and I send them via, you know, I send them a note with a copy of my book. There's still something about a book. And here's the irony of it.
For anyone who's listening, at least my experience, and has spent money on glossy collateral, like a nice brochure with a pocket folder, blah, blah, blah, you that stuff goes right into the trashcan, no one thinks about throwing away a piece of glossy collateral, which by the way, can be a lot more expensive to produce than a book. Yeah, when you please on a book, we're trained, you know, I think, at least still generationally by our parents, by our upbringing, you don't throw away a book, you feel bad if you throw away a book. So, the book has permanence. Even if they don't read it right away. It's on their desk. Rarely is it going to just get tossed? So, you can spend a ton of money sending fancy stuff that gets tossed, but a book will stay on their shelf for a long time. If it's a good book, it'll be read, it'll be talked about will be passed along. And absolutely, you know, again, for me the best thing I've done for my business, probably among the very shortlist of two or three things I've done.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, I mean, I've thrown away a lot of junk mail in my days. But have I ever thrown away a book that came in a package to me? Absolutely not. I've got plenty of free books sent to me, but there's no way I'm throwing away a book. Even if I don't like it. I'll give it to somebody else.
Jose Palomino: There you go. It has intrinsic value. It's a book. Yeah.
Josh Steimle: And it's funny how you mentioned that a book can be cheaper than the collateral piece. Because yeah, to produce a glossy and print 1000 of those. You can be spending five, six bucks per piece easy. Well with a book through the self-publishing industry, because they have the scale, they've gotten the price down so low, you can print a book for 2, 3, 4 bucks to print a whole book. And yeah.
Jose Palomino: Pretty amazing.
Josh Steimle: Yep. So what year was it that you published your first book?
Jose Palomino: 2008.
Josh Steimle: So, 2008, you published your first book. Did you see a bump in business upon getting that out in the marketplace? Or how did you use that? How did you leverage that to help your business?
Jose Palomino: Yeah, so first of all, I still have business cards, obviously. But it became a sense, the de facto business card after a call after meeting with a prospect. Even if I was invited into a meeting, somebody didn't even know I wrote a book. But at the end of the meeting, where we're agreeing to have the next meeting, or something like that, out of my briefcase, oh, by the way, and I'd signed, and I give them the copy of the book. It still had, it has a visceral effect that they go, “Oh, wow, this is cool.” And I'll get to it, I'll be reading it and stays on their desk. I don't know they read it all the time. They glanced at it, whatever they do. But it establishes me as being a consultant, who it's not that I have a book, it's that they know intuitively, I took the time to organize my thoughts.
So that's a that is a risk mitigator. For somebody buying services. It means the person you're buying from is thoughtful in what they do. They're not winging it. That's a powerful thought. And the book has that purpose. My biggest client for training came as a result of finding the book. And they actually read the book, and they invited me to speak to a breakfast meeting that they were hosting. And that turned into several six figure engagements just out of that. So, the book is totally powerful in terms of being leveraged. Since what I sell is not necessarily like an inexpensive service, it doesn't directly correlate volume from like this many books sold turns into this many programs sold. But I can definitely attribute over a million dollars with the business back to the book.
Josh Steimle: And that's great. It's great to be able to have that magic and be able to say, "Hey, I know that this is working." It's so now this book, the latest one Value Prop- Creating Powerful I3 Value Propositions to Enter and Win New Markets. That is a mouthful. But this latest book, is this your second one? Or do you have other books in between?
Jose Palomino: Yeah, so I have a book, actually after, this is the one. So right here, we rescan the cover in anticipation of we're updating the manuscript itself with some updated examples and a chapter I've written on social media, how it ties into this.
Josh Steimle: So, you're going to be re-releasing that one?
Jose Palomino: Re-releasing a book, it won't be it'll just be the updated edition. As I mentioned, I'm actively blogging. I wrote a book called Strategic Propositions, which is the name of my blog at that time, and I took the best of my blog posts and edited them down into a series of essays on all the entrepreneurial topics that you know things like entrepreneurship, pricing, marketing, and so on. So, there'll be some quick essay-type reads. So, it's not like a book, we have to recover the cover. It's like, hey, like, it's almost like a business devotional in a sense. And that's a book I'm actually very excited about, as well as been very helpful as a complement. To this, it's more of a thought-provoker that we're, this is more of a, it's actually going to show you how to do something.
Josh Steimle: Got it. And so, with each book, have you seen different results? Or have you used it in a different way to help the business?
Jose Palomino: At this point, I've used it pretty much consistently the same way as an extension of my business development activity. Probably as I have built up my network extensively in the last couple of years, in the area of experts, you know, marketing experts, folks like you, and so on. Over time, when I released the book, officially the value prop book, which will always be my flagship that will get re-released in 2022, I will tie that into a lot more promotional and co-promotional activity with folks in my network to get a much bigger reach on that. So rather than try to do that, with this original edition, it made more sense to plan for that for the second edition.
And that's another takeaway two that, you know, even if you write a book today doesn't mean that in 10 years, you won't want to revisit it, and freshen it up and so on. So that's kind of the direction we're going in.
Josh Steimle: Huh. Got it. Well, Jose, this has been great to chat with you about your book and your business. If there are people out there who want to reach out to you either to learn more about your business or about the book, what's the best place for them to find you?
Jose Palomino: Sure, well, they can go to valueprop.com, that's valueprop.com. And they can learn all about me, they can find me on LinkedIn. And if they want a PDF copy of this book, if they go to valueprop.com/book, they can get a free copy, right there.
Josh Steimle: This is another great reason to not go with a traditional publisher because a traditional publisher would never let you do that. But when you self-publish, you can do whatever you want. So, you can give away a PDF version of the book as a lead gen tool or grow your email list with it. But yeah, you get a traditional publisher, and you say, "Hey, I want to do this." And they'll be like, "No, you can't do that."
Jose Palomino: Or they'll let you get a chapter out maybe. But no, there's the whole book. Again, valueprop.com/book. And we're excited to offer this edition that way to make it available to a big audience. And there's a link there if they want to buy it on as a paperback on Amazon as well.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Jose, thanks so much for being with us here today on the show.
Jose Palomino: Well, thank you, Josh. My pleasure.
