How Will Leach’s Book Generated Six Figures in Six Months and Pushed His Marketing to a New Level
Fun surprises since the book
Will Leach spent twenty years in corporate marketing, ending at PepsiCo, before founding TriggerPoint to bring behavioral design to marketers. With Scribe he wrote Marketing to Mindstates, the book he had tried and failed twice to write alone. It made $400,000 in its first six months, and the ongoing content he built on top of it kept compounding, into a Merck engagement, inbound from Amazon and Disney, a 3,000-person keynote, and an entirely new company.
The Book He Tried Twice to Write Alone
Will studied behavioral psychology to understand how people actually buy, but every time his findings reached the marketers meant to use them, the insights got lost in translation. Marketers and researchers were speaking different languages. Fixing that became his mission, and in 2014 he started TriggerPoint to do it.
"Good creatives intuitively know how to solve problems. But there's also this world of science, and when you can bring the art and science together, there's brilliance that comes out of that. That's the future of marketing, and that's what I wanted to do."
— Will Leach
He knew a book was the way to build authority and create a category. He also knew he needed a new way to drive revenue without tapping the same customers. But he tried to write it himself and stalled twice, once grinding out just a page and a half after weeks of effort, then setting it aside for a year. It pained him to leave one of his biggest goals undone. Then he heard about Scribe on a podcast, and after wrestling with the cost, which was his entire marketing budget for the year, he committed.
"He knows me, my life, and my insecurities better than maybe even my wife does. That's because when you work with Scribe, they're in that battle with you until the end."
— Will Leach, on his Scribe writer
Six Figures in Six Months
Will knew book marketing was outside his expertise, so he leaned on Scribe's Author Impact team to run the launch while he handled email, social, and influencer outreach. Scribe landed him podcast interviews, one of which led directly to a $35,000 project with a global pet food company, plus a $3,000-a-month think-tank retainer. Another client alone brought in $40,000.
All told, Will made $400,000 from the book in its first six months, and his entire investment in Scribe was paid off within the first two weeks after launch.
The book didn't just pay for itself. It forced him to start a new company to handle the consulting and speaking that followed, and got him flown around the world to speak about his work.
"The book has changed everything. These speaking gigs are ones I would've paid to do before the book. Now I'm getting flown all over the world to speak about my passion."
— Will Leach
Then the Content Compounded
A launch is a moment; Will wanted momentum. His mantra from his CPG days was simple: repetition, repetition, repetition. So he worked with Scribe's Content Studio to keep the book's ideas in front of the right people, two articles a month, one for Forbes applying the book to marketers' challenges, one for LinkedIn applying mindstates to pop culture like Game of Thrones and The Bachelorette.
The bet paid off in ways he didn't script. His three-part Game of Thrones series caught the attention of the IIeX Behavior conference organizers, who put him on stage in front of a room of marketers. In the audience: a representative from Merck. That led to a 60-minute talk at Merck's marketing offsite, and then to real work.
"I showed them how speaking to the mindstate of their audience, doctors, could help the company predict whether their newest offering would be accepted. Then bam! They bring me in to start doing branding for an internal research consultancy and to create an internal behavioral economics think tank called BEAM: Behavioral Economics at Merck."
— Will Leach
Will estimates those two talks alone generated at least $200,000 in new projects. And the content kept opening doors. An article referencing Disney reached a Disney Parks researcher; a piece on Amazon's 4-Star store reached an Amazon researcher who invited him to work together.
"Do you know how many thousands of vendors are trying to get into Amazon every day as a researcher or as a marketing company? All I did was post my article to LinkedIn with the right hashtags and someone from Amazon reached out to me!"
— Will Leach
His growing body of content also gave him the confidence, and the proof, to pitch the Unbounce Call to Action Conference, a stage of more than 3,000 people usually reserved for professional speakers. When organizers asked why they should pick him, he simply sent them his articles, and landed the keynote.
A Book That Built a Company
All of that content became the engine for an entirely new venture, the Mindstate Group, using the articles he'd already written to feed a blog, an email list, a YouTube series, and a pipeline of new business.
"Two years ago, there was no such thing as the Mindstate Group. It didn't exist. It's here today because this content created markets where people are asking me to share my ideas to a different group of people and train them on how to apply these insights."
— Will Leach
Marketing to Mindstates is now used as part of the curriculum at three colleges, and Will already has ideas for future books applying mindstates to sales, management, and beyond. For Will, it all traces back to one decision: finally writing the book, and then never letting it sit still. Repetition, repetition, repetition.
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