Episode Transcript
Adam OLeary (00:01.356)
Welcome to simple wins the show where we talk to the architect behind the most successful B2B firms and we're currently in the middle of a massive project curating the 2026 B2B benchmark and we're looking for the high level strategist that actually work in today's market and I knew I had to get Laurier Mandin on the mic to help help us set the standard. He's been called the world's number one product marketing consultant and is the founder of graphos product and author of
I need that creating and marketing products people are actually compelled to buy. Laurier joins us today to talk about the simple wins for selling tons of product regardless of where you're at right now in your business journey. So Laurier, a big welcome to the show. So excited to have you here.
Laurier Mandin (00:49.88)
Thank you. was a nice intro, Adam. I appreciate it. It's great to be here.
Adam OLeary (00:53.71)
Absolutely, and I'm so curious. How did you get so focused on products? Where did that come from? Where did that spark of energy begin?
Laurier Mandin (01:03.904)
It happened naturally, really. started out, Graphos, I started Graphos going on 33 years ago as a graphic design company. we kind of quite early on transitioned into being a marketing business. We realized our clients didn't just want the designs. They wanted to use those to create something and to reach an audience. And within the first few clients we'd worked with, we started being discovered by people, inventor entrepreneurs.
that were creating physical products and they needed help taking them to market. And that in of itself is a complicated journey. And we found that a lot of these people were fairly clueless about how to do it. And we also found that we were having success in launching these products and really enjoying doing it, that it was such a different thing from creating, you know, helping a dentist with his marketing or an orthodontist or, you know, a gas station. While launching a physical product, the stakes were higher.
the process of doing it was more mysterious and higher risk. And it was just something that we found that we really understood what it was that was making these people who were looking for that kind of product, find that product and to feel that they needed it in their life. So, graphos became graphos product. And that is since then, for most of that 30 plus years been the focus of what we do.
And for me, it's still, you what I kind of live and breathe to do is to develop these products. I came into it with not a marketing background, but a journalism background and found myself as a writer that that's always been kind of what I've really enjoyed is coming up with just the right words, as few of them as possible to get people to be interested in something and to sign up and buy that product as quickly as possible.
Adam OLeary (03:02.678)
amazing and as you know our audience is primarily b2b guys and I'm curious what have you seen has been the biggest I guess defining factor between winning b2b products and losing b2b products?
Laurier Mandin (03:20.726)
It's very similar to with a D to C product is it's very much there are two main factors. One, how good is the product? Because really, you know, even as marketers, often people think that great marketing can sell anything. Well, you can use great marketing to get people to buy anything potentially. But especially today, if that product isn't everything that you're making it out to be and more than
it's going to come back very quickly and the product is going to fail. So the, the most important thing is making sure you develop from those early days, something that is exactly what people need and validate it, test it, make sure that not only does it solve the need that they have, but it does it in a way that those people prefer to use than to anything else that's out there. If you can achieve that, then the marketing simply has to communicate that and get people to try it. And you know, through word of mouth,
the product will organically grow and succeed. But you know, that's, that's a really big ask. And it almost sounds like a cop out as a marketer, but there's really no other way. Only great products succeed today.
Adam OLeary (04:33.389)
I agree with that 100 % and it was funny I was actually talking to an agency earlier and I told him my thought on it was I would much rather spend a hundred or six months making no money but to find a perfect offer that I can deliver massive results at scale than to spend that six months getting a hundred thousand dollar client because I know with a winning product with a winning solution you can make a much bigger impact and be able to scale it much faster.
too. So I completely agree with you there. I think everything you're saying is on point and I guess for those who are trying to understand what is a product. So a lot of B2B companies they're more in like they're in the service side of things right. So maybe they're not wrapping their head around wait what do mean by product versus a service. I deliver a service.
How do you go ahead and start transitioning that mindset to start saying, you know what, no, let's actually get into the product game as opposed to the service game.
Laurier Mandin (05:34.638)
And that's a really great question because almost any service can be productized. It can be basically refined into a way that it becomes more replicable, meaning you can come up with solid, predictable outcomes every time you do it. Now, in some cases, that's much harder. If you're a dentist and you're doing root canals, that's something that you can get good at, but it's not something that you can deliver consistently.
I mean the way that people would expect to buy a product and it's not going to work in that way, but the vast majority of services can be refined and standardized to the extent that when the customer buys it, you know what you're going to give them. You can spec it out. You can build out the list of benefits for it and, and make a very clear articulation of what you're going to deliver in a way that now
It becomes much easier to scale. Not all services are scalable because very often, you know, they need to be delivered in a specific location to a specific type of buyer and it takes space to deliver them. But with anything that you're doing, even as a service, there's always room for standardization. And I believe when you seek to do that, it always makes what you're doing better because now you're looking at what can go wrong.
You're looking at that consistency of the deliverable and you're also creating operating procedures for making sure that you're delivering that level of quality and and to me that's kind of one of the things that makes something a product is when you have standardization and you have scalability and you have ways of ensuring consistency from one batch or one round to the next to make sure that now you've got something that you you can you can teach someone else how to do
You can train others, you can sell it as a business because it's now it's not just you making your burgers. Now you've got a burger franchise and people can buy that and take it and set it up in their town.
Adam OLeary (07:40.459)
I love that. That is a great way to explain it. as you know, we call this show Simple Wins because the best experts usually have the simplest solutions. What would you say is your signature simple win? That one tweak you've seen work time and time again that our listeners could execute this week?
Laurier Mandin (07:57.838)
I've got a great one actually, and I call it eliminating killing need neutralizers. So let me explain what a need neutralizer is first. If your product or service was Superman, a need neutralizer would be your kryptonite. And an example I talk about in the book is I worked with a client that had an air purifier that was 3000 times as powerful, literally and measurably as HEPA, as the HEPA standard. had
24 hour operation because it had two hot swappable batteries. And this thing should have been, you know, a Superman product. It should have just, why would you buy any other air purifier out there? Because you can get this thing in 3000 times as good. Literally it would pull COVID out of the air and make your room safe. But what this thing had as a need neutralizer was it was ridiculously loud. There was, if you had it running it at a capacity where it could do its work, it would whine at a
not just decibel level, but a pitch that would just drive you crazy. And anybody who bought it, you could predict that they would be complaining, you know, immediately about the sound and thinking they're doing something wrong. So that was the need neutralizer for that. And almost every product or service has some Achilles heel, some need neutralizer. And the majority of the time you can eliminate these things by understanding what they are and taking steps. So for the listener today, what I want you to do
right after you listen to this is pull your last five lost deals or stalled out prospects. If you've got a CRM, that's easy to do. If not, talk to those people and find out. But for each one, you want to identify what it was that made staying with the status quo or choosing your competitor feel safer than switching to your product or service. And that might be a confusing pricing explanation.
It could be you have unclear onboarding steps or maybe to the buyer, it looked like there was a high time cost that could be, you know, a long learning curve, complex installation and set up or too much training. So you need to identify what the deal breaker was. Maybe you were too vague about what's going to happen next after they say yes, but you've got to just identify what the main reason is for losing those
Laurier Mandin (10:18.039)
prospects, what that mean need neutralizer is for your product or service and fix it. Find a way because that is what's costing you. It's wasting your effort and it's causing you to lose deals. Fix that one need neutralizer. And just by removing that point of friction or that barrier, you can usually outperform adding new value or working on refining the product or service or investing in something bigger. You'll typically get faster replies.
you'll have fewer people saying, let me think about it. I'll get back to you. And with that shorter sales cycle. So that's what I recommend to the listeners. Identify what your biggest need neutralizer is today and spend the next week working on how you're going to kill that need neutralizer and guarantee you're going to have more success and less wasted effort.
Adam OLeary (11:12.62)
I love that and I love the fact that you're a product guy because I'm sure you're gonna have a good answer for this one. What would you say is the one golden rule in your industry, in the product space, that most people think is essential but you've proven is just a huge waste of time?
Laurier Mandin (11:27.245)
Well, I'd say right off the top of my head, I think too much AB testing and that's, uh, I think a lot of product people will say, well, you got to AB test stuff. Otherwise you're not going to know how it works and what doesn't. And I'm absolutely not anti AB testing. But what I'm talking about is AB testing micro iterations. Well, you've got major sources of friction or really big barriers. Those big need neutralizers are going ignored. And there you are testing if a red button is going to work better than a green button.
And if you need to 10 X or sales, you're not going to get there with a half percent lift. That's going to come from a different button color. You might not even have enough traffic on your website in the first place to be able to get significant measurements for AB testing. So my recommendation is to AB test big things like significant difference, different positioning statements or visuals in your ads. And those things are easy to test and worthwhile. There are some tricks for if you're going to use a tool like meta ads to
test an image against another because I find their algorithm doesn't pick the one that's going to work the best for you. You've got to force it to do a sample size of let's say 5,000 views on something and not to just turn off the one that it automatically starts or stops favoring in favor of the one that it does because every time I run those types of tests, Meta's algorithm turns off the best one early on. you know, if you're A-B testing, take control of it.
and make sure you're AB testing the things that are going to have a real impact and not micro iterating because I think that just almost becomes an excuse to do busy work and not solve the real problems.
Adam OLeary (13:06.986)
I love that. And if you could just imagine, if you could snap your fingers and give your clients a massive competitive edge by December, what would that transformation look like?
Laurier Mandin (13:16.3)
Well, this is something I actually work on quite early on with any client. And so with a wave of my magic wand, suddenly their messaging would filter out the wrong buyers before even the very first call. And that's something I, you as I said, I work on all the time. Brands often focus on creating a net that's going to catch every possible fish, even if all they want to eat is tuna. So they're getting octopus and sharks and surfboards and all kinds of garbage that distracts them, wastes their
team's time and hurts their business. But by filtering out the wrong fit buyers, we fix a lot of problems. So now they can focus on delighting the best fit customers who are more, who are most likely to rave about the product and become ambassadors in the long run. And you lose all the people who are going to complain, tie up your support, return the product or misuse it and hurt themselves and create legal problems for you.
Adam OLeary (14:12.372)
I love that. Look, Laurier, where should people go to learn more about you?
Laurier Mandin (14:17.024)
So there's two places to go. If you want to learn about my company, Graphos product, go to graphosproduct.com or if you want to sign up to my daily emails, I have what I call my need feed and every single day I have in about a minute, I give you something valuable, kind of like the quick win that you talked about. But what I aim to do with, these emails is to give you something that you can spark your day with and change something in your life and move yourself forward every day. So those emails are free.
And you can also buy a copy of my book. I need that. It'll take you to the links at Amazon where you can buy that either on Amazon or audible.
Adam OLeary (14:56.012)
Amazing, Laurie, well, thank you so much for being the show. Really appreciate you coming out.
Laurier Mandin (15:00.052)
It's been great, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Adam OLeary (15:02.068)
Absolutely and everyone listening. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here and seriously Make sure to go click on the link in the description go give Laurier a visit because he is a Master of product and if seriously you are considering even trying to switch your business get out of the busy work whether it be of agency or consultant and go more product led focus Laurier is the person to speak to so make sure to go click on that link Thank you so much Laurier. Have a wonderful day everybody and I will see you on the next episode
