AI Can Create Content. It Can’t Create Thought Leadership

AI Can Create Content. It Can’t Create Thought Leadership written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Overview

What if the ideas you already have are worth more than any marketing campaign you could run? That’s the question at the center of this conversation with Peter Winick, founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage and co-author of The Thought Leadership Handbook: How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas and How You Can Too.

Winick breaks down the 5 thought leader avatars from his book, why activity isn’t the same as productivity, and how personal and systemic velocity work together to move ideas beyond 1 person’s reach. The conversation also covers where AI genuinely helps thought leaders, including how Winick’s team mined 650 podcast transcripts to write their book, and closes with the impact equation: simplicity, relevance, velocity, and share of audience. This episode is for consultants, authors, speakers, and business owners who want their ideas to travel further without depending entirely on their own bandwidth to carry them.

Guest Bio

Peter Winick is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, a firm that helps experts and executives turn their ideas into a business. He co-hosts the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast and has spent nearly 2 decades working with authors, speakers, and executives, including 3½ years building out training, development, and speaking business for Keith Ferrazzi following the launch of Never Eat Alone. Winick is the co-author of The Thought Leadership Handbook.

Key Takeaways

  • Most thought leaders are strong at their craft but rank marketing far down their list of natural strengths, which is exactly why a system for spreading ideas matters more than talent alone.
  • Activity is not productivity. Working harder or filling more hours does not automatically translate to more impact or revenue.
  • Ideas need both personal velocity, what you do yourself to spread them, and systemic velocity, the channels that carry your ideas without requiring your direct involvement.
  • Holding back your best frameworks to protect future client work tends to backfire. Sharing complete thinking builds trust and often leads to higher-value engagements, not fewer of them.
  • The impact equation, simplicity, relevance, velocity, and share of audience, offers a practical filter for deciding what ideas are worth pursuing and who they are for.

Great Moments

  • [00:01] – Jantsch opens with the core question of the episode: are your existing ideas worth more than any campaign you could run?
  • [02:20] – Winick unpacks the “thought leader on the run” avatar, the most common of his 5 archetypes.
  • [04:13] – Discussion of why ideas can’t speak for themselves, and the difference between personal and systemic velocity.
  • [13:09] – Winick describes mining 650 podcast transcripts, 2.3 million words, to identify patterns for the book.
  • [16:18] – Introduction of the impact equation: simplicity, relevance, velocity, and share of audience.

Memorable Quotes

  • “Activity is not productivity.” — Peter Winick
  • “You’re irrelevant to 99.99% of the people on this planet. And that’s an amazing thing.” — Peter Winick
  • “The best thing you can get is a fast no. A maybe is the worst thing in the world.” — John Jantsch
  • “It’s the most cost-effective net new client acquisition tool I’ve seen.” — Peter Winick, on thought leadership

Resources



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John Jantsch (00:01.368)

So, what if the ideas you already have are worth more than any marketing campaign you could run? And what if the only reason they aren’t spreading is that you’ve never built a system to move them past your own reach? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Peter Winnick.

He is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, co-host the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast. And we’re gonna talk about his new book that he co-authored, The Thought Leadership Handbook, How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas and How You Can Too. So Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Winick (00:40.674)

Thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (00:42.504)

So I had Keith Farazzi on this show. Believe it or not, I’ve been doing this show since two thousand and five. I had Keith on when Never Eat Alone came out, and I know you have a bit of history with him. may maybe let’s start there.

Peter Winick (00:55.48)

Yes.

Peter Winick (00:59.18)

Yeah. So I started working with Keith in two thousand five actually when we launched Never Eat Alone and I worked exclusively for Keith for three and a half years. So I was brought in to build out the training and development business and I took over the speaking business. and this is in the Stone Ages, you know, before so many so many things, but it was an amazing, amazing experience. He’s still a dear friend. And it it it really gave me the

John Jantsch (01:17.514)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (01:27.618)

the the the spark to say, you know what? why be monogamous? Right. Like there’s lots of other thought leaders out there that could use help because Keith, as you know, is an amazing, amazing marketer. Most thought leaders, when you put on a list of paper what they’re really great at, great at, marketing doesn’t come up in the top 100.

John Jantsch (01:32.62)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:39.117)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:45.761)

Yeah, I I can’t tell you how many people have have come to me with and and thought leaders have written a book and they’re like, What do I do to start marketing? And it’s like, Well, that was about a year ago. So you’re you’re absolutely right. So in the handbook, you you actually introduce five avatars. There’s one that’s probably the one that that I thought was most intriguing, thought leaders on the run. so unpack that one for us. That’s that’s kind of the

Peter Winick (01:54.957)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah. Exactly.

Peter Winick (02:04.3)

Yes.

John Jantsch (02:14.998)

The person that’s too busy doing the work to even consider themselves a thought leader, maybe, huh?

Peter Winick (02:20.28)

Well, the thought leader on the run, when when you break it down by the percentages over the five avatar, is the one that shows up the most. Why? Because it’s it’s i it it it’s how they operate, right? So what does that mean? It means, you know, and and it’s not that it’s good or bad, it just is, right? That in order for them to get the idea out, primarily they need to be in the room or in the zoom. So they tend to live a lot in airports, right? They’re going from event to gig to gig to gig, and they put on the

John Jantsch (02:27.085)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:45.28)

Mm.

Yeah.

Peter Winick (02:49.698)

thought leader hat or the author hat or the keynote speaker hat more than they do the CEO hat. Right. So typically when they come to us, the issue is, hey, I love my life. I’m blessed. This is amazing. I get paid the big bucks to go to be in Miami on one day and, you know, Arizona on another day. But I’m a little tired, you know, I’d like to sleep in my own bed. And from an impact standpoint, how do I get these ideas out to more people in more ways? And how do I balance my portfolio?

So it so the revenue generated is not a function of how busy was I last week, last month, last quarter.

John Jantsch (03:25.761)

S so one of the things that you another phrase that stuck with me, ideas can’t speak for themselves. you know, I

I wrote a book on referrals. my second book was called The Referral Engine. And in a lot of ways, that that was the premise of that. It’s like a lot of I think a lot of thought leaders, a lot of business leaders think, hey, I do good work, people will talk about me. You know, they’ll talk about the great results, you know, as opposed to doing anything intentionally, you know, around sort of amplifying the fact that they are referral. So

How do you actually get people to start thinking in terms of like that that that ties to that ideas can’t speak for themselves? How do you get people to actually start spreading that idea that intentionally that that they are worth referring?

Peter Winick (04:13.41)

Yeah, so I think there’s two questions there. Let me let me I hear that as two different or or two slightly different things. Yeah, right, right. so the the one is there are the ideas piece is how do we get the ideas out to the most people, the most relevant people most often. So to me, that’s typically a function of format and and and all that, right? So, you know, a book is great, people don’t read. I mean that’s a general statement, but like a book is not

John Jantsch (04:18.114)

There’s pr usually there’s six questions, but that’s that just to

Peter Winick (04:43.234)

Today is not what a book was. Video is awesome, but if you’re reluctant to get on video, you’re missing opportunity. There’s short form, there’s long form, whatever. So I so one is where do your ideas live and how does that align to where the folks that you’re trying to reach and connect with consume that information? That’s the first piece. The other piece, in terms of the ideas not speaking for themselves, is what I would think about as velocity, right? So there’s personal velocity.

John Jantsch (04:45.241)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (05:10.252)

You and I are talking right now, so I can’t be talking to someone else right now. Or if I if I was, that would be pretty rude or whatever, right? So there’s a limit to that. So my personal velocity is how I choose to spend my time to get the word out and get the message out. Now, this is more velocity than you and I just having a conversation. Although we’ve done that, and that’s great. We’re recording this, it’s gonna on your podcast. You know, lots of people hear it. That’s pretty cool. The system velocity.

John Jantsch (05:16.972)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (05:36.312)

Really thinks so personal velocity is pretty straightforward. What is it I, the thought leader, can do to get my ideas out on a on a consistent basis? The system velocity of what are the other ways it could go out that’s not dependent on me? Right. Me as the human, right? Me as the person. So there’s lots of other ways ideas get out in the universe. And are you in you know, are you choosing to participate in the right ones to meet your business objectives, which is your strategy?

John Jantsch (06:03.862)

Yeah, and and y you know, one of the challenges is there’s so many things we can do, so many things we’re told we should do. and so, you know, the I think one of the greatest skills possible is is developing focus and discipline, you know, to stay f just what you said, to stay focused on the few things maybe that you should do.

Peter Winick (06:09.465)

Yes.

Peter Winick (06:24.643)

Well, I would say yes end, right? So the yes end is the focus and discipline is great as long as you’re focused and disciplined on the right things in the right sequence to get the outcomes, which which is strategy, right? So that that to me, my clients and and you you know this better than I do, thought leaders that that we all know, they’re not lazy, right? They’re working really hard, they’re passionate, they’re evangelical in terms of what it is they’re doing. But you know, activity is not productivity.

And I think that’s a that’s a trap that a lot of thought leaders fall into. I’ll just get up, you know, I’ll I’ll work harder, do it faster, I’ll get twenty five hours in a twenty four hours day. And it’s like, Well, if you have ninety eight plates spinning in the air, you know, is that really good? You know, as opposed to like, you know, your point on the fewer, but it’s the right fewer. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:09.548)

Well sure. Right. Yeah. That that was hopefully that was implied. so one of the things, one one common thing that I’ve heard over the years

whether they’re a thought leader or just a business owner, even, you know, that it’s like, I don’t want to tell how to do my secret thing that I do. but you know, but then they won’t need me. and, you know, I’ve I I know you take the opposite view of that and so do I. I mean, I’ve always felt like they don’t want to know how to do it. They want to know that I know how to do it. and so

Peter Winick (07:39.342)

Yeah, I mean, I think you know, there’s one word for that, and quite frankly, it’s stupid, right? So it it it it you know, like w when Stephen R. Covey wrote the seven habits, it wasn’t well, we’ll just publish five of them and you want the other two, you gotta send us some money. That’s just, you know, stupid, right? And I think the way it works is we put twenty years of models and methods and frameworks into the book. And exactly the argument you just made, but if you put it out there, why do they need you? More people will need us at a higher price point as a result of that.

John Jantsch (07:44.268)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:53.474)

Right.

John Jantsch (08:01.76)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Winick (08:08.675)

The subset of people that buy the book and read the book and do it yourself, that’s awesome. I love that. Like if we can help those folks, I never could have helped them. you know, they just can’t be clients right now. Now that might change down the road. And I think that’s really the the the piece. And you know, if you think about it from a keynoter standpoint, you and I have both seen fifty, hundred thousand dollar keynoters and you get their stuff on YouTube. So you’d say, well, why would I anybody pay to bring them in the room? Well, there’s a difference of of that’s a totally different experience than watching a YouTube video.

John Jantsch (08:18.86)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:40.02)

You you mentioned the thought leader on the run was maybe the most prevalent. Who who who do you think has the most unreal realized potential now? Is that the same group? Or is there is that a different avatar?

Peter Winick (08:53.507)

You know, that’s an interesting piece. I mean, I would say they all have potential because of the different things that we have available to us today. Right. whether that’s, you know, the technology, the AI, the learning, you as as a thought leader today, you know, 20 years ago we’re talking about this to, you know, two old dudes sitting here talking about 20 years ago. The typical model for a successful thought leader was to publish a book every 18 months.

John Jantsch (09:20.652)

Yeah. War it was it was it was very effective, as a matter of fact. Yeah. Yep, yep.

Peter Winick (09:20.813)

Right. That was the your publisher put the gun to your head eighteen months, eighteen month now.

And yeah, and it worked until it didn’t? No, it worked until it didn’t. Now the reality is it takes the average author two, two and a half years to write a book. How can you get one out in 18 months? There’s a negative math problem there. So new was a relative term, right? You know, so I think now there are more options, more choices, more ways to get your stuff out. I do think that there are a lot more impact and legacy executives, right? So these are folks that are have had

John Jantsch (09:37.43)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Winick (09:55.438)

Great success, typically commercially, whether they’re C-suite in a Fortune 1000 or they built up a business and sold the business, and they’re they’re at a stage in life where they’re like, you know, I’ve I’ve done the money thing, you know, checked all the boxes there. That’s all good. But what I’m really passionate now at this stage of life is X, whatever X is. And I want to do that. And I want to spend more time doing that. And I want to understand what that is. And the way I measure my success might not be, you know, dollars generated or number of keynotes, a number of books or whatever.

But how many people are starting think about my ideas? Are they being introduced as as as as part of the vernacular in in the business community or whatever communities I serve? There’s a lot of that going on now. Cause guess what? You know, the old days of retire sixty-two and be dead at sixty five, you didn’t have a lot of runway, right? Played shuffleboard for a couple of years and then good, you know, goodnight Charlie. Right now you got twenty, thirty years to figure out what you want to do.

John Jantsch (10:41.017)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:45.473)

Yeah. Yeah. And and it’s gonna be really painful twenty, thirty years if you don’t, right? I I think I think a lot of a lot of people are coming to that realization. Talk a I mean, I can’t like we’ve gone eleven minutes, this might be a record, and I haven’t mentioned AI yet. and talk about how I mean AI is just flooding the f flooding the thought leadership, you know, category, if you will. how does somebody actually

Peter Winick (10:50.927)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:12.225)

So so so to me, a thought leader, you know, originally was you had a framework, you had a couple of original ideas, you could put sixty seven thousand words, you know, into a document. But today anybody could do that in about in about half a day, right? So so what separates real thought leadership from just, I don’t know, semi smart sounding people?

Peter Winick (11:21.155)

Yeah. Hmm?

Peter Winick (11:33.069)

Yeah, I think, you know, you could fool some of the people. So I’ll tell you bad ways or or things that are not helpful to you, your brand, your growth as a thought leader to use AI and things that I’ve seen that are cool, creative, interesting, whatever. So bad ways are, you know, you could pick up a tool and say, Give me 40,000 word book on this, this, this, and this in the style of that, this and the other thing. And it’ll spit something out. Now, anybody, you know, y you know, with any

John Jantsch (11:37.229)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:44.141)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:57.143)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Winick (12:01.934)

sort of IQ that’s in the three digits, we’ll look at that and go, There’s no there there. Right? Like there’s like there’s no there there. Right. There’s like, okay, that’s a lot of words on a page and

John Jantsch (12:10.327)

Yeah. Yeah, that that could have been a seven hundred word blog post.

Peter Winick (12:14.944)

Yeah, or or a podcast or or or or or a you know, whatever. So I think, you know, just because you can create a lot of stuff, now I think actually where you can create it, and you know this better than I as a marketer, content marketing, I think AI can do some really good stuff. From thought leadership, I think you have to say, okay, what is it good at and what is it not good at? So good at examples. I’ve seen lots of keynoters say, you know, I never spoke to this type of group before.

John Jantsch (12:31.566)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (12:40.75)

You know, newly minted IT professionals. Let me push my stuff through there and say, give me a few examples that would resonate most with this audience at this company today. So that’s research, right? I think for us, we did something that I think was kind of cool, but I’ll let you weigh in on that, right? The genesis of the book for us was a couple of years ago, I started playing around with with AI and chat and all that. Why? Because everybody else is doing. I’m like, I gotta play with this thing, right? And

John Jantsch (12:41.397)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:47.107)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (13:09.934)

What I knew was we had a bunch of models and methods and frameworks. And I knew that that would never be a book, right? That would be an IKEA manual that nobody would read. Models, methods, frameworks. Like maybe there’s a subset of the universe that loves that stuff, my my dear friends, the engineers, but like that would not be something I would read, right? But I knew that we had this podcast. And at the time we had 650 episodes and we had transcripts. So I said, hmm, let me take 30 transcripts, and they were all categorized to a similar theme.

John Jantsch (13:17.633)

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Winick (13:37.071)

And I threw it into chat and I played with it for hours and hours and hours over a weekend. And what it taught me was one, my memory is terrible. Because if somebody asked me what were your favorite, most memorable things from the podcast you’ve done, I would answer a few. But if you asked me the same question a week later, I might answer differently, you know. but it gave me themes and it gave me patterns and it gave me things to look, look deeper on. So what I did was what every sort of ADD CEO does on a Monday morning, they call their much smarter.

process oriented analytical COO. And I said, Bill, Bill Sherman, hey, I got this idea. You know, we’ve like talked about writing a book. We don’t want to write a book, but like I played with Chad over the week and I I think we can knock this thing out in like, I don’t know, a month, maybe two, you know, and here’s why. And he did the hmm, mm-hmm, you know, almost like somewhere between a therapist and somebody knows you’ve gone off the deep end. And he said, well, maybe, which is the non-committal, let let’s go check it out. Well, fast forward, 650 episodes at the time was 2.3 million words.

John Jantsch (14:34.231)

Yeah. Right.

Peter Winick (14:34.52)

Right. So if the average business is 50,000, that’s a lot of books. And Bill was able to come up with some real tools to be able to pull those patterns. And then we always went back to the tapes, right? many times we go back to the thought leader and say, You might not remember this conversation. And actually, we sort of took it a little out of context, but I want to talk to you about this vignette here. You know, this little story that you told. Can we talk about that? Because we’re writing a book. That gave us brilliance. And and to answer your AI question,

John Jantsch (14:38.295)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (15:00.036)

That would have taken us years and and six grad level interns and they like pizza and beer and to get paid every Friday. So that to me was a a smart use of AI in terms for for us to get to the book where we wanted it to be. So it is a a a good book for those that we we wrote it for.

John Jantsch (15:18.743)

Yeah, I you know, I’ve never done that with my podcast. I’ve done, you know, about twenty two hundred episodes now. I probably sh I mean, I I probably should do do that. I mean, I’ve had guests on three and four times, you know, and and or more, you know. I think Seth’s been on five times, probably. And I’m you know, I’m sure there’s something in there that that would be really interesting. And I that’s my favorite use, frankly, of AI is is analysis. you know, I just it it

Peter Winick (15:25.37)

There might be a vignette in there or two.

Peter Winick (15:31.706)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.611)

It’s just so much richer than I would ever come up with, even if I spent, you know, a hundred hours on it. talk to me a little bit about one of the things that I know that that I mean, this was part of Keith’s you know framework. And I’m I’m sure you’ve built it into yours too, this idea of impact equation, you know, like getting getting into rooms that you know you maybe don’t know how you’re gonna get into. so talk a little bit about how that idea influences some of the thought leaders you work with.

Peter Winick (15:51.418)

Total.

Peter Winick (16:06.897)

Mm.

Peter Winick (16:18.991)

Yeah, so I think every thought leader wants their work to have impact. Right? They just do. Like what we’re not writing this for ourselves, although sometimes we are at a moment in time. But the impact equation it was a way for us to say, how do you do this? Like, cause Keith’s secret sauce is the power of developing relationships. That’s his secret sauce, right? And Never Italy and a lot of his other books were sort of what that looked like, and then he’s evolved into sort of some different thinking today. So we looked at the impact equation because equations are cool, right? Like

John Jantsch (16:22.895)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (16:48.869)

They just are. And said it here’s how it what it looks like. Number one idea is simplicity. You got to get it down to its molecular. Now that sounds obvious and easy, but ask an academic that spent 25 years as the top of their game or world class at whatever, tell me the gist of your work in two or three sentences. Most can’t do it because it’s been beaten out of them. It’s not how they’re trained. It’s not whatever. And if you can’t make it like simple, then it’s not accessible. So there’s no point there.

John Jantsch (16:49.496)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Winick (17:17.317)

The next is the relevance to the audience, right? So you might have something that’s really, really simple. But if you gave me the the the simplest way to knit a blanket, it has no relevance to me. I’m not someone that knits. Now, somebody else that might be, my God, that’s that’s a hack that I’ll use every day. But like what’s the relevance to me? And then the next is this the velocity. We talked about velocity before. What are you doing to get it out there? And then what is the share of audience? And I think the share of audience piece is interesting. You know, if this was a startup, we’d be talking about total addressable market.

John Jantsch (17:27.801)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Peter Winick (17:46.662)

But one of the most freeing things for me and that I try to share with my clients is guess what, John? You’re irrelevant to 99.99% of the people on this planet. And that’s an amazing thing, right? Because all you need to do now is say, what can I do to be as relevant as possible to that point one percent that matters most? And maybe it’s 95% or whatever. But like for the most part, you know, you’re irrelevant, right? I’m irrelevant. And the the beauty of that is I don’t have to spend my time chasing my tail.

Right. Like I know that I wanna talk to people like you. I don’t wanna be on a podcast for you know, I don’t know, stay at home moms in Iowa. Bless their little hearts. But like those aren’t my peeps.

John Jantsch (18:23.46)

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s one of my favorite lines from Sandler. I had David on the show a couple of times, you know, over the years, was just he’s you know, the mo the best thing you can get is fast knows. you know, the idea of of the people are like the worst thing in the world is a maybe because now you gotta like worry about it for the the next six months and send eighty seven, you know, follow up emails and

Peter Winick (18:50.064)

Yeah, exactly.

John Jantsch (18:50.998)

you know, but for somebody to go, no, you’re not for me, you know, and obviously that’s in a sales environment, but but as a thought leader, clearly understanding who’s for you, who’s not for you, and communicating that. So people sort of self select whether or not they want to be in your universe, right? I mean, that’s part of the equation, isn’t it?

Peter Winick (19:07.355)

Yeah.

Yeah, and and you don’t want to be in the conversion business, right? If you have to spend a lot of your energy and effort, you know, it’s a great business model for the Mormons to work for them, but like it’s really expensive to try to convince someone that your way is a better way, that your way of thinking might help them. You could do a little bit of that, but if I gotta spend, like you said, you know, 10 phone calls trying to show you that my way is better than yours, why wouldn’t I talk to someone that’s already sort of absorbed some of my thinking and said, you know, I kind of dig what you say, and I think you could help me.

John Jantsch (19:12.558)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:17.834)

Yeah.

Peter Winick (19:38.021)

That’s just a better place for both of us to be.

John Jantsch (19:40.206)

Yeah, hundred percent. one of the I’ll I’ll ask you directly and and I think we’re be gonna be on the same page on this. what’s the biggest benefit of being seen as a thought leader? You know, even if it’s in a tiny pond, you know, of of your city of your city?

Peter Winick (19:56.464)

Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll tie this back to marketing because it’s what I believe, right? So we every one of us, I don’t care what business you’re in, whether it’s it’s it’s product, whether it’s services, professional services, selling consumer package, because we’re all being commoditized. That’s not a good thing, right? So if you’re being commoditized, what does that mean? Downward pricing pressure, lack of distinction between you and somebody else, this, that, and the other thing. So I believe, not for everyone, but

John Jantsch (20:11.694)

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Peter Winick (20:23.983)

Definitely high-tech, financial services, professional services, and and and many, many more, that thought leadership is the most cost-effective way to stand up from the competition, to show the world what you’re about, to put it out there. You can’t, you know, if I was going to come out with a new beverage, I could never outspend Coca-Cola. Just not going to happen. But you see these new beverages coming out now, for example, that are, you know, protein enriched or whatever, or probiotic or whatever. It’s like, okay, so if you’re going to put out a probiotic beverage, the first question I would have is.

What the hell is a probiotic beverage? That’s great leadership. Here’s what it is and why it might be beneficial to you, whatever. So I think take a step back and say, what could you put out there in the world to sh to punch above your weight, outshine your competition, and and you know, lead with your thinking. Because everything else that you do, if I’m an accountant, there’s a million other people that can do my taxes, right? If I’m a lawyer, plus or minus, you know, they’re all kind of the same. Consultant, like it’s just an agency. They’re all the same.

John Jantsch (20:52.643)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:03.15)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:11.642)

Yeah, hundred percent, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:18.882)

Yeah. Well and and they they might not be, but that’s the perception. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I will tell you, I I actually took it into the home services business. I had a remodeling contractor that I convinced to do this in two thousand early two thousands to be a thought leader. And now they char they’re they’re the largest in their in their community and they charge a premium. that’s that was really the answer. I I mean you said it in a number of ways, but

Peter Winick (21:24.101)

That’s which is more important, right. Yeah. And I think

John Jantsch (21:48.814)

Being the seen as the thought leader, you can charge a premium. People expect to pay a premium, you know, for you. So

Peter Winick (21:53.541)

Well, and it’s a it’s you know, at the end of the day, it’s just math. It’s it’s the most my experience, it’s the most cost effective net new client acquisition tool I’ve seen. Right. So I’ll give I’ll give you another example that was, you know, you gotta be smart. I think it was ten years ago, my math could be wrong, when Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriage. Okay, that’s cool. So what does that mean? Well, there was a divorce lawyer that happened to be gay, and he said, geez, here’s what’s gonna happen in the next six, eighteen, twenty-four months. I could put a stake in that ground.

John Jantsch (22:10.649)

Mm.

Peter Winick (22:21.455)

And put out some thought leadership on the nuance of gay marriage because I’m gay, I’m a divorce attorney, so I’m I’ve got an advantage. Let me start putting this stuff out there because as they’re walking back down the aisle is probably not the time to handle my card. This will take some time. And and it did. Like you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out, you know, more people that weren’t able to get married got married. Yeah, it’s definitely a new category, right? And and when that time came.

John Jantsch (22:21.752)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:27.672)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:39.448)

Yeah, yeah. It’s a new c a n a new category of business, so to speak. Yeah, that’s that’s funny.

Peter Winick (22:48.015)

He was already putting articles out there and things out there or whatever that that market came to him as opposed to spending big bucks putting out, you know, billboards or whatever the divorce attorneys might do.

John Jantsch (22:52.59)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (22:58.33)

So so Peter, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the the show. Is there some place you’d invite people to find out about your work and obviously the pick up a copy of the Thought Leadership Handbook?

Peter Winick (23:11.599)

Well, the Thought Leadership Handbook is, as they say, available wherever books are sold. So you can find them in the usual places. You could find me at our site, which is thoughtleadershipleverage dot com, and on, you know, all the typical socials.

John Jantsch (23:24.312)

Yeah, awesome. Well again, great catching up with you and I appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Peter Winick (23:30.938)

I will. Thank you. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.


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Did AI Make Referrals Your Most Important Marketing Channel

Did AI Make Referrals Your Most Important Marketing Channel written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Something odd is happening in marketing right now.

Output is way up. Results are down. Business owners tell me they’re publishing more content, sending more email, and running more outreach than ever, and the phone rings less than it did 2 years ago.

Here’s what I think is going on.

The great flattening

AI made competent marketing cheap. Any business can now produce a decent blog post, a polished cold email, and a professional-looking ad campaign in an afternoon.

So everyone did.

The result is a flood of marketing that all sounds the same. Buyers can’t tell who’s good anymore because everyone looks good on paper. And when everything looks professional, professional stops meaning much.

Two more shifts pile on. Ad costs keep climbing, and I don’t need to quote a stat you’ve already felt in your own budget. And buyers are doing more of their research inside AI assistants. They ask ChatGPT or Claude who to hire, get a summarized answer, and may never see your website at all.

Add it up and the channels most businesses depend on for new customers (content, ads, outbound) are getting louder, pricier, and less believable all at once.

The half of the journey nobody can automate

I’ve taught the Marketing Hourglass for 2 decades: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer. Unlike a funnel, it widens back out after the sale, because the customers you keep and the fans you create are where the best growth comes from.

AI just made that second half a lot more valuable.

Anyone can generate Know, Like, and Trust content now. A delivered experience still has to be earned. So does a customer telling a friend, “hire these people, they took care of us.”

The bottom half of the Hourglass gets built one customer at a time, and that’s exactly why it’s about to become the highest-return part of your marketing.

I wrote this book 16 years ago

In 2010 I published The Referral Engine. The argument was simple: referrals are too important to leave to chance, so build a system that produces them.

Here’s a fact that surprises people. I’m known for Duct Tape Marketing, but The Referral Engine is my best-selling book. It still sells today, 16 years on. Owners have always understood at a gut level how much referrals matter, and the book keeps finding readers because the problem never went away.

What most readers didn’t have back then was urgency. Referrals stayed the nice-to-have channel, appreciated but never built for, because ads and SEO and email were working fine.

They’re working less fine now. And the ideas in that book turned out to be built for this exact moment. Here are the ones that matter most.

People are wired to refer

Making a good referral feels good. It’s social currency: introducing a friend to a great business makes you look smart and useful. That wiring didn’t change when the tools did.

Which means your customers want to refer you. Most just don’t, because nothing in your business makes it easy, obvious, or timely.

That’s a system problem. System problems have fixes.

A referral system beats a referral hope

Most owners treat referrals like weather. They happen or they don’t.

But a referral system has the same parts as any other marketing system: a clear picture of who you want referred, language your sources can borrow, an offer that makes the referrer look generous, a trigger for when to ask, and a way to track what came in.

Here’s the part that’s new. Follow-through used to kill referral programs. Somebody had to remember to ask, personalize the thank-you, keep partners warm. AI handles that kind of follow-through well now. The strategy still has to come first, but the old excuse about not having time is gone.

Referability comes before referrals

No tactic fixes an unremarkable business. Before any referral campaign, answer one question: what happens in your business that’s worth talking about?

Close the gap between what you promise and what customers experience. Then engineer one moment worth retelling. The surprise check-in. The problem you fixed before the client noticed it. The onboarding that felt like a welcome instead of paperwork.

Referrals are the byproduct of experience design.

Your best referral source may be another business

Direct referrals come from customers. Indirect referrals come from strategic partners: businesses that serve your exact customer right before or right after you do.

For most B2B companies, the partner engine is the bigger one, and the less built one.

Try this. List the 5 businesses your best customer hired in the 12 months before they hired you. That’s your partner shortlist. Teach those firms exactly who to send you, give them something worth giving away, and send business back on purpose.

I’ll give you a live example from our own shop.

My friend Mike Michalowicz runs a group of business advisors called Prosper. These are the people founders already trust with profit, operations, and the big picture. When one of their clients needs marketing leadership to hit a growth target, guess who gets asked for a name.

We’re working with 3 clients right now who came to us through that group. The engagements are going well, and going well is the whole engine: results for a referred client are what produce the next referral. Just recently, another advisor sent us a new client the same way.

The part worth studying is the order of events. Those first referrals showed up on their own. The system came second. Now we’re debriefing the advisors who send us business to learn what prompted each referral, defining exactly which founders we want sent our way, and building tools an advisor can hand a client the moment marketing comes up in a planning session.

Your business almost certainly has a pattern like this running right now. The work is spotting it, then formalizing it.

And a quick word if you’re a business advisor yourself. When a client needs marketing leadership and you want to hand them a name you can vouch for, that’s the exact gap our advisor partnership fills. See how the advisor partnership works.

The new part: AI is listening to your customers

Here’s what makes a 2010 book feel current in 2026.

When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, the answer gets assembled from reviews, testimonials, case stories, and mentions scattered across the web. Your customers’ words are the raw material AI uses to describe and recommend you.

Word of mouth now travels machine to machine.

That turns review generation and testimonial capture into discovery infrastructure. Every satisfied customer is writing part of your AI sales pitch.

Try it yourself. Ask 3 different AI assistants who they’d recommend in your category and your market. Compare what they say to what your best customers say about you. The gap between those two answers is your work.

Where to start

Four moves for this quarter:

  1. Track where your last 10 customers actually came from. Most owners are surprised by how much of their growth is already referral-driven.
  2. Pick one moment in your customer experience and make it worth talking about.
  3. Build your partner shortlist using the exercise above and set up 2 conversations.
  4. Ask for reviews at high points (right after a win, a renewal, a thank-you email) and make it a 30-second task for the customer.

Do it in that order. A referral push with no strategy underneath it is just another random act of marketing.

The businesses that win the next few years will treat the second half of the Hourglass as their primary growth channel and build a system to run it. The good news is that your competitors are all busy generating more content.

Stop Selling to People Who Were Never Going to Buy

Stop Selling to People Who Were Never Going to Buy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode

Overview

Duct Tape Marketing Podcast cover art featuring guest Rob Snyder for the episode "Stop Selling to People Who Were Never Going to Buy," hosted by John Jantsch.

Most founders spend years chasing customers who love their product but never buy. In this episode, John Jantsch talks with Rob Snyder, a serial startup founder, Harvard Innovation Labs fellow, and operating partner at Grix VC, about the pull framework: a four-part model for identifying the customers who are practically guaranteed to buy because reality has already done the convincing for them.

Snyder walks through why traditional sales advice gets the physics backwards. Instead of trying to persuade prospects to want a product, he argues the real job is spotting people who already have an unavoidable project, a list of options that fall short, and nowhere else to turn. He and Jantsch dig into how this shows up in discovery calls, why chasing pain points is a trap, and how founders and service providers alike can use this lens to qualify leads faster and stop wasting energy on the wrong-fit prospects.

This conversation is for founders, consultants, and marketers who are tired of long sales cycles and prospects who nod along but never close. Snyder’s approach offers a practical way to rethink lead qualification, sales conversations, and even content strategy around real buyer readiness rather than guesswork.

Guest Bio

Rob Snyder is a serial startup founder, a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, and a former McKinsey consultant who graduated from Harvard Business School. He serves as an operating partner at Grix VC and coaches early-stage founders through his Finding Pull program. Snyder built the pull framework after years of struggling to convert customers who claimed to love his product but wouldn’t buy. He is the author of the new book, The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong.

Key Takeaways

  • The pull framework has four conditions: an unavoidable project, a timeline that can’t be delayed, existing options that fall short, and a real inability to solve the problem without you.
  • Pain points alone don’t predict buying behavior. What matters is whether a pain point has become an active priority.
  • Forget the product or service entirely when qualifying a lead. Focus only on the customer’s situation and whether they’re stuck.
  • Personas average across your customer base and can mislead you. A single strong case study from your best customer is a better design target.
  • The best discovery-call opener is simple: ask why they took the call. It surfaces the pull framework without asking for it directly.
  • When a prospect doesn’t have pull, don’t try to create urgency. Point them toward the trigger event that would make them a fit later, and move on.

Great Moments

  • [01:49] – Snyder describes the phone call that broke open his thinking about why customers weren’t buying
  • [03:56] – The four conditions of the pull framework are introduced: project, unavoidable, list of options, limitations
  • [06:12] – Snyder explains why founders need to forget their product entirely when qualifying leads
  • [09:10] – Why personas can mislead founders, and why a single best-customer case study works better
  • [13:38] – Snyder shares his goal of reaching 75 percent certainty on fit within the first five minutes of a discovery call
  • [19:02] – The single best discovery-call question for testing real buyer pull

Memorable Quotes

  • “If you don’t have pull, it would be weird if you bought. You just have other priorities, or your existing options are good enough. Nothing I do is going to change that.” — Rob Snyder
  • “The first step is to totally forget your product or service. Totally ignore it for a second and focus exclusively on the customer.” — Rob Snyder
  • “What matters is when, not if it’s a pain point, but if it’s a priority, if it’s something they’re actually trying to do something about.” — Rob Snyder
  • “I would much rather let reality do the convincing than me.” — Rob Snyder

Resources



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John Jantsch (00:02.075)

You know, most founders keep marketing to people who say they love the idea but won’t buy. My guest today spent years figuring out why, and his answer cuts against most of what’s written about marketing and sales today. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rob Snyder. He’s a serial startup founder, fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, an ex-Makkense consultant who graduated from Harvard Business School. He’s built

Multiple companies serves as an operating partner at Grix VC and coaches early stage founders through his finding pull program. We’re gonna talk about his new book, The Power of Pull. What you need to know about customer demand to build a successful startup and why most founders get it wrong. How did you get all of that on a book? Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Snyder (00:54.25)

Thank you, it is the longest title. They pay me by the word.

John Jantsch (00:56.433)

Awesome. So you d at least for my reading of of your materials, you kind of went through the whole playbook yourself, did everything the experts said, still couldn’t get your customers to buy something that they told you that they thought was awesome. So how long did that go on and and what kind of finally broke it open for you?

Rob Snyder (01:20.834)

Yeah, was two years of the worst day of my career happening and being beaten every successive day where everything made sense on paper, seemed like they should buy it. They would nod in sales calls and then they wouldn’t buy. I just thought I was incompetent, uniquely incompetent until one day I got a phone call. Again, two years in, we’re just…

John Jantsch (01:23.921)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (01:36.187)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Snyder (01:49.027)

The ego that one gets out of McKinsey and Harvard Business School had been crushed to smithereens at that point. And I got a phone call from a potential customer who I had tried to pitch to when he said, hey, yeah, I have no idea what you were trying to sell me. It wasn’t relevant to me. But I’ll pay you to do X for me. And I was like, all right. And that’s when it started working.

John Jantsch (02:11.94)

Yeah, so so how long I mean, you know, like all good consultants, you have a framework. it has, you know, four conditions and all those good things, but how long did it take you to kinda before we get into them, I mean, that was like a light bulb moment, but but that’s not like exactly where like all four things tumbled into place, right? So, I mean, how did you kind of unearth by trial and error these elements that you then put together in your framework?

Rob Snyder (02:39.104)

Yeah, it was when that customer called me that something clicked in my head and that it wasn’t really about my product. Like that was the first big aha moment. And it had nothing to do with my product at all. It was about something that was going on in their world that they were trying to do but couldn’t do. And that thing made my product relevant or not.

And so that was the first big light bulb moment. And then we launched our second product, which also went zero to a million really fast. And so I was like, wow, I’ve really got this now. And then a couple of my friends brought me into their startups to help them do the same thing. And so as I kept trying to apply what I had learned, it started developing from kind of an artisanal, like, I don’t know, I’ll just, let me try to copy paste exactly what worked for me.

into something where I was able to more understand the physics of it. And then the framework came way later.

John Jantsch (03:37.541)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:44.432)

So let’s let’s talk about the the four conditions. project unavoidable list of options and limitations. So put that together for us now that we have names for

Rob Snyder (03:56.525)

Yeah, so that creates the pull framework. The pull framework together defines a person who would be weird not to buy your product. Everybody else who does not have pull would be weird to buy your product. And so the four characteristics are the project. They have some project. They have something they’re trying to do. In marketing, you might think of this as a job to be done, project on to-do list, kind of same thing. That project has to be something they can’t delay. They can’t do it.

John Jantsch (04:10.068)

Yeah.

Rob Snyder (04:25.772)

you know, in six months or a year, they’re totally fine waiting or not doing it at all. So it has to be unavoidable. That’s the second one. But just because they have something they have to do today doesn’t mean they need you. So they have to be in a state where the list of options they have considered or tried are not good enough. They have limitations. And if all four of those things are true, they’re trying to do something that they are unable to do with their existing options, then you show up.

and they rip the product out of your hands. And that’s how the world works, I have found.

John Jantsch (05:03.673)

Right, so you you intentionally I think mentioned product several times in that description. Would this same approach really apply to, say, a consultant who’s selling a service of some sort?

Rob Snyder (05:16.6)

Totally, totally. Yeah, I’ve accidentally developed a consultancy out of this and it turns out it applies exactly the same to it. what I found is that product, people selling products think that it’s about the product. People who sell services think it’s about our cool frameworks and all of those, and our expertise and all the stuff behind it. And it’s still all about the customer’s poll.

John Jantsch (05:44.262)

So so is the first step we have to stop caring about our product, caring about our service. I mean, I I don’t mean that facetiously. I mean kind of like admit they don’t care about what we do. They want the problem solved or whatever it is. I mean, d is that does it take that leap first? Because I see it all the time. I mean, you know, you look at any web page and you know, ninety percent of it’s, you know, describing the product. so I mean, is that the first leap or mindset change that has to happen?

Rob Snyder (05:57.154)

Yes.

Rob Snyder (06:12.622)

The first step is to totally forget your product or service. Totally ignore it for a second and focus exclusively on the customer. And what is that situation they’re in where they’re trying to do something, they’ve considered different options and those options aren’t good enough. So they are stuck. And you just focus on that without even thinking about your product because it, for some reason is or service.

John Jantsch (06:17.414)

Yeah.

Rob Snyder (06:41.038)

If you or I just start thinking about our product, what we’re going to do is we’re going to describe that situation that we would like them to be in, not the situation they are actually in.

John Jantsch (06:50.449)

So a lot of marketers, I I wouldn’t say this is an advanced case, but maybe it’s a step forward, have realized that if they can point out pain points, you know, that that kind of sucks somebody in to say, yeah, okay, you can fix that thing for me. How is this maybe a step beyond that?

Rob Snyder (07:12.792)

So pain points are a thing that, especially in startups, we are told to go looking for pain points. Because if you find pain points, then they’re going to buy. I’ve just, my own startups, a bunch of friends startups have found that we’ve done hundreds of customer interviews where we find everyone’s nine out of 10 pain point. We have them rake it on a scale out of 10, and then nobody buys. And what you’ll learn from that experience is that most people who have pain points

are okay continuing on with their pain points, even if they are big and important pain points. So what matters is when, not if it’s a pain point, but if it’s a priority, if it’s something they’re actually trying to do something about. If you conflate those two, you are in for a world of hurt.

John Jantsch (07:45.626)

Mm.

John Jantsch (08:01.573)

Yeah, like that little hole in the ceiling that water forced through doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m probably not gonna fix that, right? So Yeah

Rob Snyder (08:08.872)

Exactly, yeah. I have it where the sun comes through from 10am to 1pm every single day and blasts me in the eyes and it’s just like not a problem. Like it’s yes it’s a problem, yes it’s a pain point, but I just shift a little.

John Jantsch (08:19.417)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:23.117)

Yeah.

Again, marketers have been very trained to to build personas and and, you know, understand buyer behavior and what how do you actually take it that step of like somebody would be crazy not to buy your I mean, how do you find them?

Rob Snyder (08:40.642)

Hmm. Most businesses that are not zero to one already have found them. You have a bunch of customers already. If you look across your customer base, you have some people who bought really fast and are awesome and some people who have not and are not. They’re just not a good fit for you. And what we tend to do is we tend to design our marketing, our business around the average.

John Jantsch (08:55.727)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:00.731)

Yeah.

Rob Snyder (09:10.4)

of all of them, which is what a persona is, right? We’re combining a bunch of different characteristics of different people into, what I’ve found is instead of doing that, you focus on your best customer and you think about that customer’s case study, that customer’s poll, when they bought and you just design for that case study.

John Jantsch (09:14.533)

Right, right, sure.

Rob Snyder (09:35.758)

rather than an abstract persona, a concrete case study. And you just think about your business as, we’re just going to repeat that case study a bunch of times and find people who look at that case, we’re going to use that to sell, we’re going to use that forever.

John Jantsch (09:51.74)

So would you would if you were if I were gonna bring you into my business and and admittedly we have a lot of people that are not startups necessarily, they’re businesses that have been going for a while. But quite frankly, they have that mix that you just described. You know, t I I would venture to say twenty, thirty percent of most businesses have customers that they’d like given the choice, they would punt. but you know, they keep showing up and they keep serving them. would you if you walked into a business like that,

Rob Snyder (10:14.35)

Yes.

John Jantsch (10:21.457)

How would you sort of work backwards to to find like, here are your poll people?

Rob Snyder (10:26.06)

Yeah. So what I mostly focus on are if you’re doing sales calls, that’s really, really useful. And especially if you record the sales calls. So what I do is we say, okay, talk to me about your best customers. And in fact, send me their sales calls and then send me sales calls of people who have not been quite as good customers. And what you can do is you can actually listen to the sales call using the pull framework to say,

John Jantsch (10:32.463)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.

Rob Snyder (10:55.404)

Okay, what was the project on their to-do list? They’ll often tell you, we just don’t listen for it. What was the project on their to-do list? Why was it unavoidable for them then? What options had they looked into? Why weren’t those options good enough? And you start to compare and contrast those really good customers with the other ones. This is not like a Harvard PhD activity. It is really just look at these two different calls, compare and contrast with the pull framework.

John Jantsch (10:59.545)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (11:18.875)

Yes.

Rob Snyder (11:23.968)

And then you start having some very interesting conversations on the back.

John Jantsch (11:28.961)

Would you even go as far as to say that if you that that you actually would use this as a filter to some degree? You know, because we we have people that show up all the time. It’s like I need marketing. Can you do marketing? Well, yes. But here’s how we do it, here’s who we serve, here’s who we can bring value to. And and I but but I know a lot of people also just, you know, somebody shows up and says they want marketing, it’s like, okay, I’ll send you a proposal. would you say that that

that you would go as far as saying you should almost run some sort of poll exercise to to qualify somebody.

Rob Snyder (12:06.513)

100%. Just think of all of the pain that comes from working with someone who’s not your best fit customer. I’ve done this a bunch of times where I worked with a PR firm that was not specifically for startups. They were for like certain kinds of business and we just spoke past each other and we were both frustrated with each other at the end. There are so many cases of this where by being ultra specific, you often think,

John Jantsch (12:12.303)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:20.24)

Yes, yes.

Rob Snyder (12:33.76)

Well, I’m not going to have enough leads. I’m not going to have enough, you know, companies coming inbound. Well, actually, the more specific you are, the more people look at you and say, wow, you are for me specifically. And then they come inbound. And so you actually get more lead rich and you disqualify people who won’t be a fit, who won’t appreciate what you do.

John Jantsch (12:36.762)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:53.723)

So a lot of a lot of interactions, especially initial interactions, are can be very brief. you know, you have your short discovery call or maybe they even fill out a form or something that, you know, that that’s all the information you get. Do you have some tools, scripts, techniques that that actually help somebody? First off, I guess the work is they’ve gotta actually be able to identify, you know, who those people are themselves, so they know what they look like, right?

Rob Snyder (13:18.67)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:21.605)

But then do you have once they start generating leads, do you have tools or techniques that that really allow somebody to to sift through that? Because a lot of times I I have discovered sometimes you don’t really know somebody’s gonna be a fit until you’re kind of down the road a bit.

Rob Snyder (13:38.743)

Yeah, we’re actually a lot of the companies that I work get to our goal is in the first five minutes of a discovery call to have 75 % certainty on that this person will buy and be a good fit. And so that’s, that’s the goal to work towards. There are ways to get there. What I, what I find is that first of all, it is, you have to have your pull framework filled out for what your best fit customer is. You just have to know that if you don’t, then it’s just going to, you’re just not going to know.

John Jantsch (13:48.901)

Yeah.

Hmm.

John Jantsch (14:03.814)

Yeah, right.

Rob Snyder (14:08.394)

Once you have that filled out, then the beginning of the call, of a discovery call, is asking them to fill out the pull framework for you. Now, not actually pulling it up and telling them, fill this out for me, but it’s just saying, why’d you take this call? What are you hoping to get out of this? And they will often start to fill out the pull framework, and then you ask some clarifying questions there. And you don’t ask it from the perspective of like, all right, I want to convince you that you should buy.

John Jantsch (14:18.137)

Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Snyder (14:37.366)

You ask it leaned back saying, I’m not sure if I’m a fit for you. You tell me.

John Jantsch (14:42.543)

Yeah, yeah. So w when you kind of went from struggling to, you know, thinking, hey, I got this figured out, did it change how you sell sold from that point on? So so just describe how that change happened.

Rob Snyder (14:53.068)

Yes. a hundred percent.

So I had the wrong theory of sales. was totally backwards on sales. had a physics upside down, which I thought when I was just starting out that, okay, you build a good product that offers really a ton of value, solves big problems. And then what sales is, is that sales is a way to convince people to want your product and buy your product. But the core physics, if we use those terms are…

I convince you to buy. And what I realized, through lots of pain, was that I will never convince you to buy. If you don’t have poll, it would be weird if you bought. You just, you have other priorities, or your existing options are good enough. Nothing I do is going to change that. And so what I’ve realized is that sales is about basically them convincing me to let them buy.

John Jantsch (15:29.339)

Yeah, it’s

John Jantsch (15:39.057)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Rob Snyder (15:56.575)

or said differently, them trying to do something and being stuck. That’s what causes them to buy. And they will buy my product if I just get them unstuck.

John Jantsch (16:13.211)

So the the unavoidable step probably does some of the heaviest lifting, right? in the in the in the process, it seems like. what is what is what does that trigger actually look like? How do you find it? you know, g are there ways to find it like even before, you know, a sales call, like somebody somebody’s actually given the signal on LinkedIn?

Rob Snyder (16:36.076)

totally, totally. So it’s gonna be different for each company. I’ll give an example. There’s a company that sells to nonprofits that I know that sells them a reporting tool that they can use to raise money from donors. Well, when is that, when do they have an unavoidable project around needing to improve their fundraising? Well, it’s often when they’ve been trying to fundraise, maybe they’ve hired some.

and they are struggling to fundraise. And so all of the startups content that goes out is about that situation. Everything they post is about, so they attract people who are in that situation. So that’s the goal is I don’t wanna talk to people who don’t have you. So everything I’m putting out into the universe is to bring those people.

John Jantsch (17:25.105)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:29.947)

So let’s say I’m in a halfway through a sales call and I re like they don’t have pull yet. Do I try to change that in somehow or is it literally like, hey, come back when you when you got it?

Rob Snyder (17:45.036)

One of the most liberating things that founders and business owners tell me when they apply poll is that when somebody doesn’t have poll, they stop having to think about them. That you stop having, because think about, you have to convince them to change their priorities. That’s really hard to do. And then you have to convince them when they have a new priority to choose you over other options that they haven’t looked into. And it’s like, okay, that’s…

John Jantsch (17:47.203)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:57.158)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:05.253)

Yeah.

Rob Snyder (18:14.959)

That could happen, but then you’re have to convince them to use your product or service and you’re gonna have to convince them to value it. You’re gonna have convince them of all of these things. I would much rather let reality do the convincing than me. And so, yeah, you just say, okay, cool. It seems like you’re totally fine. One thing you might look for is XYZ happening. When one of those things happens, that might be when you’re a better fit.

John Jantsch (18:42.577)

So if somebody’s listening to this and they’ve got a sales call like this week or right after they listen to this, what’s one question they should add to that call to test whether a prospect has real pull?

Rob Snyder (18:57.923)

Hmm

Rob Snyder (19:02.863)

I would say, can I give you two? Is it okay if I give you two? Okay. The most important question to ask in a sales call is at the very beginning. So thanks so much for taking the conversation. Why did you take the call today? That question will almost always fill out the poll framework for you.

John Jantsch (19:05.115)

Sure, you bet, you bet, you bet.

John Jantsch (19:20.785)

Mm.

Rob Snyder (19:22.721)

Then, once you have some of the poll framework filled out, my favorite question to go to is, is, so maybe help me understand. I’m hearing that you’re trying to do this. You basically recap poll. But maybe I’m wrong. you know, maybe you help me understand. Is this something you actually need to do right now? And you can’t use your other options on? Maybe help, help, help me understand that. And people say when they first do that,

It’s like, feel like I’m convincing them not to buy. And what you’re really doing is you’re just testing if poll is actually there, if it’s actually real.

John Jantsch (19:55.77)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (20:01.531)

You know, though I suspect there is also a little psychological I don’t know what the right word is, pull behind that idea of maybe you’re not ready. So wait a minute, I’m ready to solve this problem. And isn’t there a little bit of that? It that that that pushing away kind of makes it more attractive.

Rob Snyder (20:17.974)

that-

Rob Snyder (20:22.255)

That is not the intention or the cause of it. It may be an unintended benefit of it, but what you do is what you don’t want. One of the things I always have in my mind in a sales call is imagine two people who are out to dinner where one of them thinks it’s a date and the other doesn’t. Like how poorly that can go. And that’s not what, you don’t want that.

John Jantsch (20:25.606)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:43.845)

Yeah. That’s a great analogy.

Rob Snyder (20:51.307)

in your sales call, where you think they’re likely to buy and you’re going to convince them to buy, and they don’t. And so that’s the purpose of this is just for us to understand, do they actually need help?

John Jantsch (21:04.325)

Yeah. It it really, you know, all the sales training and techniques and questions in the world are great, but again, it’s that it’s that work ahead of time, isn’t it? The that you know, going into that conversation, knowing what you’re looking for to to the point where, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years. I mean I can have a conversation with somebody for about thirty seconds and I have a pretty good sense of whether or not it you know it’s gonna be a great fit. And I think people, you know, you do get better at that.

Obviously, but I think there’s a lot of work to be done to to get to that point, isn’t there? Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. so Rob, I again I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Is there some place you’d have people connect with you? Obviously find out about about the book, but I’m guessing you have a whole series of of tools and workbooks and sheets that

Rob Snyder (21:36.771)

Yeah, and hopefully the book helps people not have to take 30 years to get to that intuition like you’ve developed. Like, that’s the hope. But yeah, it took me way too long as well.

John Jantsch (22:01.75)

can help them master the pull framework.

Rob Snyder (22:05.209)

Totally, yeah, robsneider.org is where you can find everything.

John Jantsch (22:09.197)

Awesome. Well again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Rob Snyder (22:14.959)

Absolutely. Great to meet you, John.


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AI Strategy Starts With Leadership, Not Technology

AI Strategy Starts With Leadership, Not Technology written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode

 

Overview

What happens to a business when the tactical, repetitive work that once trained junior employees gets absorbed by AI? That question sits at the center of this conversation with Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute. John Jantsch and Roetzer trace the arc of AI adoption from the early days of IBM Watson through the launch of ChatGPT, and into what Roetzer now sees as the first innings of a much longer transformation.

The conversation moves through several themes that matter to any business owner trying to make sense of AI right now: why AI has become the underlying operating system of business rather than just another tool, why the traditional path from junior to senior employee is at risk of disappearing, and why literacy, as opposed to technology, is the real foundation of organizational transformation. Roetzer also introduces his theory of an AI-era apprenticeship model, a way for companies to reinvest efficiency gains into developing new talent rather than simply cutting costs.

This episode is for marketing leaders, agency owners, and small business owners who want a clear-eyed view of where AI adoption is headed, along with practical thinking on how to build teams that can keep up.

 

Guest Bio

Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched MAICON, the Marketing AI Conference, and co-hosts The Artificial Intelligence Show. Roetzer has delivered more than 200 keynotes on AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government.

 

Key Takeaways

  • AI has become the underlying operating system for business, not just a marketing tool, which means AI literacy now matters at every level of an organization, starting with the C-suite.
  • The traditional junior-to-senior career path is breaking down because AI is absorbing the tactical, repetitive work that used to train entry-level employees.
  • Roetzer’s apprenticeship theory proposes reinvesting a portion of AI-driven revenue-per-employee gains into developing junior talent, rather than sending all of the savings straight to the bottom line.
  • Companies under near-term growth or margin pressure face the strongest incentive to reduce staff, while companies willing to play the long game are better positioned to invest in people.
  • Of Roetzer’s eight pillars of AI transformation (vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, performance), literacy is the true starting point, and full transformation requires vision and ownership from the CEO, not just tools handed down to teams.
  • Pushback against AI is a natural and growing response to real disruption, and business leaders need to hold space for both the opportunity and the genuine costs.

 

Great Moments (Timestamps)

  • [00:01] – Introduction: what happens when AI absorbs the work that used to train junior employees
  • [01:52] – Roetzer’s origin story, from a 2012 concept called a marketing intelligence engine to the founding of the Marketing AI Institute
  • [06:23] – AI as the underlying operating system of business and society
  • [12:19] – The eight pillars of AI business transformation and why no company has passed the test yet
  • [15:34] – Why AI literacy is the real foundation beneath every other pillar
  • [18:05] – The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice: Roetzer’s theory for rebuilding entry-level work

 

Memorable Quotes

  • “I overestimated how quickly everyone else was going to figure this out and the impact it would have in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, true transformation it was going to cause to the economy and businesses.” — Paul Roetzer
  • “If we remove all of that repetitive, data-driven work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge?” — Paul Roetzer
  • “You have to play the long game for sure, and a lot of companies aren’t going to have that benefit.” — Paul Roetzer
  • “We have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology… this is on par with the invention of computers and electricity.” — Paul Roetzer

 

Resources



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John Jantsch (00:01.891)

So, what happens to a business when the entry-level work that trained your people gets absorbed by AI? Today’s guest has been thinking about that maybe harder and longer than most. And his answer is possibly uncomfortable. The traditional path from junior to senior breaks, and most organizations have no plan for what replaces it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Paul Roetzer. He is a former, or I’m sorry, he’s the founder, not former, and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched the Marketing AI conference, MACON, co-hosts the Artificial Intelligence Show, and has delivered more than 200 keynotes for AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government. I think after Chat GPT launched,

Even though Paul was on that the trail, that certainly opened up many, many doors for him. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Roetzer (01:03.192)

China, it’s always good to be with you and to catch up. It’s it doesn’t happen often enough.

John Jantsch (01:05.783)

Yeah. You you I think your first appearance was when PR twenty twenty, maybe bookwise was that was the name of the book, right?

Paul Roetzer (01:16.492)

the kind of the agency was PR twenty twenty. That was the agency I sold back in two thousand twenty one. And then we had, I don’t know, the a marketing agency blueprint and the marketing performance blueprint. It could have been one of those that we were on for.

John Jantsch (01:27.171)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s dive into the AI Institute. you built it really to help marketers understand AI. and then it just kind of blew up, right? I mean, it was an idea that then, you know. So so what it made clear that you needed to build that, which at the time was kind of outside of the marketing realm.

Paul Roetzer (01:38.018)

Yeah. Seven and a half years later.

Paul Roetzer (01:52.406)

Yeah. So the I I I’ll give the quick origin story. So actually it goes back to the PR twenty twenty days. In two thousand and eleven, I wrote the marketing agency blueprints. That was my first book. And at the time we were a few years into being HubSpot’s first partner and kind of at the forefront of marketing technology and social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and all of those things. and that was the year IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. And I became obsessed with understanding how that technology worked. And then

John Jantsch (02:16.226)

Mm.

Paul Roetzer (02:21.997)

Could it actually be applied? That same idea of it was basically a prediction engine. Take data in, you understand the language behind it, and then you make predictions about what comes next. And so I started working on this concept of what I was calling a marketing intelligence engine. And this is back in 2012 and 13. And the premise was: if we could use Watson-like technology to predict what to do next, what net next best action, next strategy, how to spend our marketing dollars, then we could build.

An entirely new way of doing marketing. And so that was the original hypothesis. And I shared that idea in my 2014 book. And then that was like out of the 50,000 word manuscript, it was like a thousand words. And the book was not about AI otherwise. And that was all anybody wanted me to talk about. And so fast forward to 2016, and we were like, Well, what do we do with this? Like I’m really intrigued by it. I’m convinced it’s gonna change marketing and business in the world, but like I don’t really know what’s possible.

So we created the Marketing Institute to research it ourselves and then tell the story of AI, like what was real, what was happening. And so yeah, we created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And and then, like I always half joke, like we survived long enough financially for ChatGPT to show up. I sold my agency in 2021, focused exclusively then on AI and the institute and eventually SmarterX. raised a seed round of funding that kind of got me through the the really lean years and

Chat GPT came and all of a sudden the interest in AI exploded.

John Jantsch (03:53.699)

So I’ve been through I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through several of these game changing technologies that came along. And there seems to be this curve. You know, there’s the early adopters, of course, and you know, and then there’s the overhypers, you know, and then there’s the like, my god, I guess it’s not going away. We better figure it out. And and then there’s just kind of like, now it’s plumbing. we don’t even call it anything anymore.

Do you see AI having a similar path even if it’s f faster and and more disruptive?

Paul Roetzer (04:27.637)

I did. so my belief was actually by 2020 we wouldn’t have to call it AI anymore. I just thought it was gonna be like marketing and software and stuff. So I what I’ve always said was I overestimated how quickly everyone else was gonna figure this out and the impact it would have, like in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, like true transformation it was gonna cause to the economy and businesses and things like that.

John Jantsch (04:32.842)

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:44.236)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (04:53.047)

So I have always sort of had this feeling that, like, well, maybe we shouldn’t even call it an AI institute or AI technology or whatever. We shouldn’t differentiate in that way. But I’ve now become convinced that we have a we have a very extended runway ahead of us where being AI matters, like being AI forward matters. Like it’s a differentiator within organizations to say that you’re AI forward, that you understand the technology, you use the technology.

John Jantsch (04:59.517)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:12.406)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (05:18.319)

and then as a business, I think it’s becoming fundamental for leaders of businesses to be able to think of themselves as an AI forward organization that they’re looking at ways to infuse it into people, processes, technology. And so I don’t know, it’s like I I thought we would be past it by now. And I I honestly I feel like we’re just in the first innings still.

John Jantsch (05:37.154)

Yeah. Yeah. Think about how many defunct social media marketing agencies, you know, are out there, for example, right? and and I think your your idea that, we don’t wanna it’s great that that’s the thing now, but we don’t want to go down that to where it just becomes, you know, business consulting or something. But you know, I think one of the major differences is AI’s impacting

Paul Roetzer (05:44.449)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:02.301)

every area of a business. I mean, you know, the finance people are using it, the operations people are using it. I mean, obviously the marketing people are using it. And think that’s probably a significant I mean, there are many others, but but would you say that that’s maybe in some ways why it’s you’ve got this long runway is because, you know, it’s basically gonna impact everything.

Paul Roetzer (06:23.499)

Yeah, I I’ve I said years ago that I believed that AI was going to become the underlying operating system to businesses and society, that it was it was literally going to be woven into every aspect of what organizations do, their people, their processes, their their technology. And then within society, it was gonna become the epicenter of the economy. It was gonna basically be the driver of growth. And that’s all starting to happen. And so I do think that.

John Jantsch (06:31.543)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.871)

I was gonna say they’re definitely there are definitely people suggesting that that’s where we are, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (06:52.041)

Yes, it’s like you the like if if we stopped building data centers right now and if the five technology companies that are spending north of eighty to a hundred billion a year on AI infrastructure stopped doing it, the economy would crumble. Like if we whether people realize it or not, we have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. And so I yeah, I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology. Social media is a tool. Like

John Jantsch (07:07.576)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (07:19.297)

This is this is on on par with like the invention of computers and electricity and like it it yeah, so that’s what that’s what’s different.

John Jantsch (07:19.649)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:24.611)

Cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a rising bubble of people that are anti AI. you know, you you see the marketing positioning of, you know, no AI was used in the creation of this. Do you think that is simply a trend or do you think that that will

Paul Roetzer (07:46.51)

I think it’s going to grow significantly. I think it’s gonna be stoked by interest groups that want it to grow. And then I think it’ll naturally grow because people’s lives and communities are gonna be impacted in negative ways. So I always like the the closest thing I can equate to to try and make it tangible for people is, you know, if we go back to 1994, 1995, the internet’s like becoming a a real thing in society. And at that moment, we said, you know what?

There’s gonna be this thing called the dark web, where these like horrible people do horrible things and it’s gonna cause like online bullying and like you’re gonna have all these downstream super negative things that happen. But we go back and say, but would we still build the internet? Yeah, like a hundred times out of a hundred, you would probably still build the internet because it has changed society in a bunch of profoundly like positive ways. And I think AI is gonna be the exact same thing. There’s going to be absolutely

Negative things that happen as a result of it, whether it’s building of data centers in communities that don’t want them, job loss and displacement, whatever. Like those things are gonna happen. They’re a byproduct of it. But if all goes well, it’s also gonna transform health and create growth engines and opportunities we’ve never had before and solve mysteries in the universe. Like it’s gonna do all these things too. So it’s totally natural that there’s just there’s pushback because it’s starting to affect people’s lives. And we

you know, wherever your role in this is, you have to be empathetic to that. Like it’s and that’s my problem with a lot of like the Silicon Valley mentality is accelerate at all costs and like forget if if there’s risks and fears, like throw those aside. I’m not in that boat. I feel like we have to embrace the fact that not everyone loves this and it isn’t all just abundance and amazing things. There’s actually a bunch of things we have to deal with as a society as a result of this.

John Jantsch (09:32.652)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.391)

And you know, another issue that I think is I mean, I think there were some unforeseen things that came out of other technologies. But I it feels like even if you ask the smartest people in the world who are making this stuff, they don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And I think that there’s there’s an element of that that I think people some regulation needs to be in order to like not get too far out in front of something they can’t stop.

Paul Roetzer (10:09.227)

Yeah, there’s growing like so recently Demis Asabas posted online about the need for regulation and experts ending a framework. He’s the the co-founder CEO of Google DeepMind. Anthropic has made proposals around regulation frameworks. Sam Altman has called for regulation on Capitol Hill. Like they all claim to want it in different forms, but the regulation can be done where it actually has the negative effect on society. So there’s this like.

Very fine line that I am not the expert in by any means about how to do regulation well. there are very few people that are building the technology who who don’t think that there needs to be some protections and guardrails in place, that we don’t have to stop and say this is gonna have a serious impact. We should be thinking more deeply about it. The challenge has been the leaders of these labs, they’re so focused on just building the technology and competing with each other and competing with China and other countries. They’re

John Jantsch (11:04.524)

Trying to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (11:05.525)

Yeah, they don’t sit around and think about the writers who are going to lose their jobs. Like it’s just not and they live in a bubble where it’s like they’re all just technologists and engineers and like they’re all going to have jobs for the foreseeable future because they’re all growing and hiring more of those people, but they don’t think about the average knowledge worker and the impact it’s going to have. So they’re hiring economists and philosophers and like they’re trying to now consider it, but for a long time, they were just heads down, accelerated at all costs.

John Jantsch (11:33.706)

Yeah. Well and I and I think unfortunately when it comes to regulation, you know, you think about the government bodies that are going to decide they need to regulate this. I mean, they can’t even line a swimming pool. You know, so the idea that sorry, that was a cheap one, but the but the idea that they’re gonna actually you know, regulate an industry like this, you know, is pr probably kind of frightening.

Paul Roetzer (11:55.586)

Well, yeah, and they don’t understand the technology and where it’s going. Like the idea originally a couple of years ago is to limit it based on how much compute was needed to train a model. Well, that’s laughable amounts of compute these days. Like and then they just find ways around it. So every time they try and find a way to regulate it, it generally is a a very narrow minded way of thinking about it that would eventually be obsolete within like a year or two.

John Jantsch (12:19.158)

So let’s talk about eight pillars of business AI transformation. That’s something that you have written about. hopefully you remember writing about that. I’ll I’ll I’ll name them for you vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, and performance. the key thing, whether you want to check any of those boxes, is you said no companies ever passed this test yet. where do companies break down in terms of any of those elements when it comes to transformation at an organization?

Paul Roetzer (12:49.419)

Yeah, so this a relatively new concept that I shared. It’s part of a larger transformation system that I’m developing. And it’s like the first piece to it because we talk to a lot of companies of all sizes, small, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. And everybody’s trying to figure out like what does it actually look like? We throw out this term transformation, but like no one really has quantified how do we actually do that. And what we’ve seen time and time again is, especially in larger enterprises, but it happens in small businesses too.

Just treat it as this technology problem. Like, we just gotta go get some Chad GPT licenses and give them to people. And like then we’re gonna get all these amazing benefits of AI. What app, yeah, and they throw it into the technology pool to do. What needs to happen, and the fundamental flaw that we see is a lack of situational awareness and vision from leadership. And so, my like, if I boil this down to one simple thing, the CEO has to drive the transformation. Like

John Jantsch (13:21.226)

Yeah. And the CTO’s in charge of it. Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (13:43.316)

It has to be so important to the organization that the CEO has embedded him or herself in the deep understanding of the moment, of what the technology is capable of, of the impact it’s going to have on their organizational structure, their people, their products, their markets. And if the C-suite doesn’t have that, then you are not going to see a complete transformation within an organization. So vision and strategy from the leadership on down.

Is what’s fundamental. What’s driving most of the innovation and transformation in companies so far is actually bottom up, where people are just like bringing their own devices to work or getting their own personal accounts and just like doing their own thing. And then sometimes that turns into a collective of people doing their own thing. And then maybe a department’s like, let’s form around this and let’s get a marketing AI council or something. But what often lacks is that top leadership that truly understands this needs to be one of like

John Jantsch (14:19.222)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (14:41.089)

The three biggest priorities we are working on as an organization.

John Jantsch (14:44.428)

Well, and I think you hit on a really thing the thing I see all the time is that they’re treating it like tools, like, here’s a new laptop. you know, as opposed to the fact that this is probably you probably need to rethink your entire organization. You probably need to think what it is, rethink it what it is you actually do. and that might be a little bigger question, you know, about do you even have the right people? you know, do you have, you know, is the structure make any sense anymore? I mean, there’s just

You know, a lot of people like you and I sit around and talk about this stuff, and I think a lot of fifteen person business businesses are saying, Yeah, okay, tell us. I mean, it’s one thing to say you need to rethink your organization. Okay, but like what’s the roadmap for that? I mean, how does somebody, you know, w when you talk about those pillars, are there two or three that they ought to be addressing before they ever like sign up for a subscription? Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (15:34.87)

Yeah, so I mean, literacy is the fundamental thing. So it it’s number six on my list, but it does it’s actually probably number one overall because the even the C suite needs AI literacy. They need the knowledge and the understanding and the belief system around AI and its impact before they can prioritize it strategically within a business. So developing understanding of AI capabilities, the comp comprehension of like what it is and what it’s capable of, and then the competency to use the tools in an intelligent way.

John Jantsch (15:44.972)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:02.199)

That like you know when to go in and ask ChatGPT for help and and then you know what good looks like. So AI literacy is actually the foundation of all the other components. And then if you do that in individually and you go through the organization and say, okay, we’re gonna raise the skill level of everyone, the understanding of AI and the ability to work with it, then you can you can move the organization forward more, not only efficiency with higher efficiency and productivity, but drive actual innovation and growth as a result of it. And then as a small business, you can start to think.

Wow, like for 20 people, we could be performing at the level of 50 people. I was actually having this conversation today with our director of operations, who she and I used to work at my agency together. And we were laughing. I said, Could you imagine if we had these tools back when we owned an agency? Like it like 90% of what we did for clients, AI is capable of doing now. And so, like, like the perfect example we gave was we used to like give.

John Jantsch (16:49.301)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:59.443)

Monthly performance reports to clients by the 15th of the following month. So you’d wrap the month up, you’d organize the data, you’d put it into the thing, you’d do the analysis, you would create the PowerPoint, you’d schedule the meeting, and by the middle of the month, you were talking about what happened the previous month. We now at SmarterX, our COO runs those things in real time. So like at any moment, she has it connected to the data.

John Jantsch (17:04.514)

Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (17:27.585)

She can tell the narrative of what is happening across all of our KPIs. And boom, here’s the update in Zoom. Stuff that we used to spend dozens of hours creating on a 15 day lag, we now do in real time. And so when you apply that across entire businesses, all different departments, you start to realize how different we can run companies today.

John Jantsch (17:49.535)

One thing that and and I said it in my beginning kind of question was that also trained a lot of people, right? A lot of the people that did that work learned a lot about marketing by doing that work, and they’re now missing that. how do we fill that gap?

Paul Roetzer (17:57.495)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (18:05.547)

I don’t know. it is the focus of my Make Con 2026 keynote. So the name of the keynote is The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice. And my basic hypothesis is that we have to redefine entry-level work because the tactical things that all of us did to become experts, to know what good looks like, to have judgment and taste, and to be able to work with these amazing tools in a responsible way.

We can do it because we did the data-driven repetitive work all those years and learned right from wrong and good from bad and things like that. And then we edited other people’s work. And it’s like if you remove all of that work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge? And so I don’t know the answer, but my current theory is that it looks something like an apprenticeship.

That organizations will have an increased revenue per employee number in as a benefit of AI. So you use AI to run a more efficient business, thereby generating more revenue per employee. But rather than putting that straight to the bottom line, you reinvest a portion of that increased revenue and profit back into developing entry-level talent through an apprenticeship program where they don’t have a direct impact on revenue. They’re actually an expense item for the first maybe two to three years of their career. And so

John Jantsch (19:02.304)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (19:31.81)

That’s a theory, but then you actually have to operationalize well, okay, if if that actually is a viable idea, how do we do it? How do we train them? How do we use these tools to advance their learning so they still come out after two or three years with not only the level we had after two or three years, but maybe like 2x that. So we actually accelerate their learning, their taste, their judgment, their capabilities by leveraging AI technology to train them in new ways. And I have yet to meet a single leader.

Of any company of any size that has solved for

John Jantsch (20:05.558)

Yeah, that’s really interesting too, because I mean I I see it every day. It’s like right now some of the entry level people can’t recognize when AI is just hallucinating and saying stupid stuff. and and or just off brand, you know, even. and I think a lot of that comes from, you know, the fact that you can sit around and look at something and and immediately, you know, know the course correct.

but that just comes from experience. And I think I think that’s a really brilliant idea, the idea of of apprentice. but again, you also mentioned expense. and I think that’s what’s gonna make it hard for people. But the you know, companies that invest like that, you know, long term, we’ve seen it time and time again, win. so I think that yeah, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (20:52.833)

Yeah, you have to play the long game for sure. And a lot of companies aren’t gonna have that benefit. Like I’ve always said, if you’re publicly traded, venture capital backed or private equity owned, you’re f you’re fighting an uphill battle to follow that kind of model, to play the long game and not just take the near term benefits of cost reduction.

John Jantsch (21:10.134)

Are are we past the period when, you know, there was a lot of noise about like I’m I’ve gonna be able to reduce my staff to, you know, a third of what I have. Are we past people realizing that because they’re actually working harder now than they ever were?

Paul Roetzer (21:24.853)

No, I I don’t think we’re any I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of people realizing that they can reduce their staff. Like, so my my basic premise here is I I do think that AI is gonna drive a lot of innovation, a lot of new businesses, a lot of growth and jobs through entrepreneurship and and creation. But when I talk with leaders at enterprises who are under these very near-term

financial requirements to run the company where you have to either be growing or if you’re not growing fast enough, you have to be cutting expenses to still maintain the profit margins that are required. In those businesses, it’s really hard to sit there and say if you’ve had 15 marketers for the last 10 years, that you still need 15 marketers. Because we if if you train someone properly, like a a manager director level can do a lot of the entry-level work and where you maybe just don’t.

need that entry level higher you were gonna make this year. And so in companies that aren’t growing, I think it’s very hard to make an argument that they will maintain or increase their staffing levels. I I think companies that are growing less than 10% will be under tremendous pressure in the very near future. Once their CEOs realize what’s possible, I think they’re gonna be a lot enough pressure to reduce their staff.

John Jantsch (22:41.131)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:44.748)

Talk to me a little bit about MACON. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, but once you spend our last minute or so together talking about Makeon and inviting people I think you said you even had a special discount code for me.

Paul Roetzer (22:57.187)

yeah. So Mekon, this is our seventh year. It’s hard to believe. I I was I posted something recently about how crazy it actually seems in retrospect. We started this conference in 2019, three years before ChatGPT. We were running an AI conference for marketers. sometimes I struggle to think like, what were we teaching at that point? But it was a lot of like, here’s what it could become, here’s how to find use cases, here’s companies that are building, you know, like.

John Jantsch (23:06.946)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (23:22.729)

Email subject line writing tools and predictive modeling for ad spend and things like that’s what we were focused on back in those days. So it’s become something much larger. That first year we had 300 attendees from 12 countries. This year will be well over 2,000. I know I think we had 19 countries already represented last time I saw it. and we we basically break it into applied AI and strategic AI. So now there’s like two fundamental tracks: track for leaders that are thinking more big picture about the impact on the organization.

John Jantsch (23:24.929)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (23:51.618)

And applied AI is all about use cases, technologies, things like that, where you go in and then we have build sessions and workshops. So it’s an incredibly immersive environment. It’s a great community of other AI forward marketers and business leaders. So if you’re trying to find your people, try and find that community of other people who are thinking and trying to work toward like a human centered approach to this, that’s what Make On is all about. So yeah, you can go to makeon.ai, it’s A I C O N.ai, it’s in Cleveland.

October thirteenth to the fifteenth, and then duct tape one fifty is the promo code for saving a hundred and fifty bucks.

John Jantsch (24:24.492)

So two T’s in there, so D U D U C T T A P E. Yes, okay. Awesome. Duct tape one fifty gets you hundred and fifty dollars off, I’m guessing.

Paul Roetzer (24:28.481)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (24:34.209)

That’s I’m guessing too. Looks like looks like that that would be what the one fifty would be in my mind. So if not, we’re gonna make it so.

John Jantsch (24:40.546)

Awesome. What yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, that idea of literacy, you know, if you’re if you’re finding yourself behind, what a great place to pick up that component and and actually do some hands-on work as well. Well, Paul, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully it won’t be that long. we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Roetzer (25:04.205)

All right, John, it’s great to see you.

John Jantsch (25:05.907)

Dude.


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Why Great Leaders Change Feelings Before Minds

Why Great Leaders Change Feelings Before Minds written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode

Overview

"Duct Tape Marketing Podcast cover art featuring Owen Fitzpatrick, guest on the episode Why Great Leaders Change Feelings Before Minds"What does state propaganda have in common with the voice in your head telling you to play it safe? According to social psychologist Owen Fitzpatrick, more than you’d think. In this episode, Fitzpatrick joins John Jantsch to unpack the psychological machinery behind belief change, and why the same principles that drive nation-level propaganda campaigns also drive marketing, leadership, and personal transformation.

Fitzpatrick introduces a three-part framework for how beliefs actually form and shift: a belief has to feel right, it has to fit in with who a person believes they are, and only then does it need to make sense. Marketers and business leaders often jump straight to the logic and reasoning stage, missing the emotional and identity work that has to happen first. Fitzpatrick draws on examples ranging from Apple’s iconic ad campaigns to internal AI adoption struggles inside organizations to show how this plays out in practice.

This conversation is for marketers, business owners, and leaders who want to understand why logical arguments so often fail to change minds, and what to do instead. Fitzpatrick also draws a clear line between ethical influence and manipulation, offering a useful lens for anyone in the business of persuasion.

Guest Bio

Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of nine books translated into more than twenty languages. He has worked with leaders at organizations including Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank, and has studied propaganda firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. His newest book, Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times, explores the psychological forces that shape belief formation in individuals, organizations, and nations.

Key Takeaways

  • Beliefs form through three gates in order: feels right, fits in, makes sense. Logic is the last gate, not the first.
  • Affective realism means people perceive reality through the lens of whatever they’re feeling in the moment, which shapes what they notice and remember.
  • Strong brands work because they connect to identity. People buy products that reflect who they are or who they want to become.
  • Ethical influence focuses on what the other person genuinely wants and is honest about intent. Manipulation relies on deception regardless of what the other person wants.
  • Resistance to change, including AI adoption, often comes from psychological reactance. People push back when their autonomy feels threatened, not necessarily because the idea itself is wrong.
  • Leaders get more buy-in when they help people see who they can become in a new scenario, rather than just presenting the logical case for change.

Great Moments

  • [00:01] – The propaganda-versus-personal-beliefs framing that opens the episode
  • [01:12] – Fitzpatrick shares the personal story behind the question that changed his life
  • [03:40] – Introduction of the feels right, fits in, makes sense framework
  • [06:27] – The Apple and identity-based buying example
  • [07:36] – Drawing the line between influence and manipulation
  • [10:51] – Why teams say yes to a plan while not actually believing in it
  • [14:19] – The staff member who went from hating AI to mastering it
  • [20:01] – Revisiting the classic Mac versus PC ad campaign
  • [21:00] – The Old Spice commercial as an identity-driven marketing example

Memorable Quotes

  • “People don’t follow plans, they follow beliefs.” – Owen Fitzpatrick
  • “Being right is not enough. If you want it to be successful and it to work, you need to make it feel right.” – Owen Fitzpatrick
  • “The stories that you sell to yourselves become the beliefs that you buy into.” – Owen Fitzpatrick
  • “Influence is about figuring out what is it that they want and is good for them, and how can we connect the dots to what is it that I want them to do.” – Owen Fitzpatrick

Resources



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John Jantsch (00:01.976)

So, what if the voice in your head telling you to pull back, play it safe, or try the strategy that didn’t work last time is running the same playbook as a state propaganda agency? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Owen Fitzpatrick. He’s a social psychologist, keynote speaker, and the author of nine books, translated into more than 20 languages. He’s worked with leaders at Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank.

Across more than thirty countries, and he studied propaganda firsthand in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. We’re gonna talk about his newest book today, Inner Propaganda, leading hearts and minds through turbulent times. So, Owen, welcome to the show.

Owen Fitzpatrick (00:48.985)

Thank you so much, John. Real pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (00:51.502)

So you write about time when you were fourteen years old, that you wrote a suicide note. you say the one question changed the story you were believing in that moment. So looking back now, with everything you know about all the beliefs, of how beliefs I should say actually work, what do you think happened psychologically?

Owen Fitzpatrick (01:12.323)

So from a psychology point of view, I think what happened was my brain asked a question, and I’m still not to this day sure where that question came from, but wherever it came from, the question I asked myself to help me to look at things differently so that I felt differently about the situation. So always we talk about the importance of persuading people and using logic and reasoning. And anyone in marketing will obviously know that the most important element of being able to convince people is largely about the way in which we make people feel.

So the ability that we have to create a feeling in the other person will not just determine how they feel about the product, it will also dictate how they think about and what they believe about it as well. So the question I asked myself was, and this was when I was in the middle of writing the suicide note where I was looking to end my life, I was I I I basically apologized to my parents and I said, I’m sorry that I have to do this, I just can’t see any other way. but I love you so, so much.

And then the question that I asked was, Is this how much you love them? And that question was so powerful because it almost like in a cynical way forced me to imagine what I was doing to them. And it changed the feelings that I felt at this moment. And so it wasn’t the fact that I loved them that saved me because lots of people end their lives and they love the people and the people love them. But it’s the fact that it drew my attention and it caused me to feel.

quite strongly that there’s no way I could do this. And I think in many ways it changed my belief in that moment from believing I needed to die to believing I needed to live. And I think all my life, that’s what I’ve been searching for. All those journeys to, you know, or countries like North Korea, all the work I’ve done from a corporate perspective as a therapist when I work with thousands of clients, it’s always been working on this notion of how do you help a person to change beliefs? And I believe fundamentally we need to look at it from three gates that we go through.

The belief has to feel right. It has to fit in with who the person is. And only then will it make sense. And I think that most of the time when we try to persuade ourselves or others, we fall into the trap of just trying to make it make sense using logical reasoning. But that’s the last gate to enter. It’s table stakes, but it’s not the most important. And I think that’s the message I’m trying to get out with the book.

John Jantsch (03:30.475)

Yeah, so walk through that framework. feels right, fits in, makes sense. that’s that’s really the central premise of of the entire book or framework of the book. So walk us through that a little bit.

Owen Fitzpatrick (03:32.469)

Mm.

Owen Fitzpatrick (03:40.954)

Sure. So there’s a concept in psychology or neuroscience called affective realism, which basically means that the way in which we perceive reality is through the lens of the feeling we’re feeling. So if you’ve ever felt hangry, that means hungry b you know, hungry and therefore you’re angry or tangry, that means you snap at people and you’re angry when you’re tired. Those experiences that you feel actually dictate how you respond or how you take in the world. So when you’re hangry or tangry, often you don’t even notice it. You just see the world in that angry way.

And the problem is that because our feelings play such a big part in determining our reality, we can walk away from a situation having experienced a particular situation in a specific way based on how we feel. So when we feel anxious, we tend to see the world through that anxious lens. There’s a c another concept called mood congruent cognition, which means we’re more easily able to remember situations which is associated with the feeling we’re feeling. So when we’re depressed, we’re more likely to remember negative events in the past.

We’re more likely to imagine negative experiences in the future. And so our brains, based on how we feel, determine where our focus lies. And it’s almost like our brains are like a news station, right? A news channel. Just like a news channel will A, select it. Like if you watch Fox versus you watch CNN, you’ve got they’re both selecting totally different facts or totally different data points to report the news on, number one.

John Jantsch (05:00.365)

Totally different tot totally different alternate facts, but go ahead, yes.

Owen Fitzpatrick (05:04.95)

yes, yes, yeah. And and and also different worlds, right? But you look at CNN, you look at Fox News, they will paint a picture of whatever they’ve selected at that moment, and they’ll also then engineer a narrative about it, what I call truth engineering. So they’ll engineer a narrative about both. And so what you have is you’ve got two different news channels based upon their agendas, creating two totally different realities, two totally different worlds. Now, if you bring that to the brain, the brain does the exact same thing. You experience the world.

And your brain, based on how you feel, will dictate what you pay attention to in that moment. And also, whatever you are paying attention to, it’ll engineer a narrative or story. And the stories that you sell to yourselves become the beliefs that you buy into. And so what’s really critical is we start to recognize this process. And so it starts with feelings. Then the second piece is what I call fits in, which is really about internal indoctrination. It’s that we won’t accept a belief unless it fits in with who we believe we are.

And again, from a marketing standpoint, if you were trying to sell to someone, the reason I buy Apple products is because they’ve convinced me that I’m the kind of person that needs to buy Apple products, right? If Apple were releasing an apple for $200, I’d probably go, I want to get one of those. I’m the kind of person that eats $200 apples, right? Because they have created a brand so strong that my identity is locked to it. And sometimes it’s not even who I believe I am, sometimes it’s who I want to be in that moment. But it’s

John Jantsch (06:24.471)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This this’ll make me cooler. Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (06:27.181)

Exactly. If I buy these you know, these these sneakers, this will allow me to jump as high as Michael Jordan. Like this is the mentality that we’ve built over the time. And when we want to change beliefs, if we if we truly want to be able to get a person to see things differently and have a different belief system about something, we need to number one make sure it feels right to them. Number two, it needs to fit in with who they are. And then we can give the logical reasoning, then we can give the benefits, then we can overcome the objections, then we can do all the w work of logic.

John Jantsch (06:30.637)

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Owen Fitzpatrick (06:56.557)

But these first two gates are the things that a lot of people miss out on. And I think people in in terms of the field of marketing have a bit of an advantage because they do, based on my market research, they realize how powerful emotions are. But I think when we put it together in that sequence, it gets a lot better results than we do when we just try to push forward with the traditional, here’s the reasons why you should buy my product.

John Jantsch (07:17.857)

You know, a anytime marketers, business people start talking about influence and psychology, particularly, i is there a manipulative element to this? Like if I understand that that’s all I have to do is turn these dials on you, then I know you’re gonna believe whatever I say. I mean, isn’t that a little bit of what propaganda does?

Owen Fitzpatrick (07:36.15)

In many ways, yes. I mean, influence, if we take influence propaganda, manipulation, let’s let’s clarify the term. So influence is when you’re able to communicate in a way that you impact the decisions or the attitude or the perspective or the beliefs or the feelings of the other person, right? manipulation is when you deliberately deceive the other person so that you can get them to do exactly what you want. And I I always clarify the difference between the two is ethical influence.

is about figuring out what the other person wants, understanding what you want and learning to connect the dots. So

John Jantsch (08:08.885)

And it also and and it might be good for them, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (08:11.585)

Yes. Because you’re yeah, yeah, very good point. But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to engineer it so that you’re getting them what they want. And what they want is not always something tangible. Sometimes what they want is a feeling, right? So you’re providing that feeling through the product that you’re selling. It’s perceived value, which becomes real value because they experience it that way. And then the second piece is the use of deception. So manipulation is when you you you know, you’re more likely to use deception, whereas

when we’re honestly ethically influencing someone, we’re not lying about anything. We’re not e you know, we’re not deceiving them in any way, shape, or form. And so to me, influence is about figuring out what is it that they want and is good for them, to your point. and how can we connect the dots to what is it that I want them to do? And then second of all, how can I do this in an honest way? Because manipulation is I don’t care what you want. I’m gonna do whatever I can to to make you know or believe or feel what I want you to feel. And if we take propaganda.

Generally, that’s the state’s attempt to manipulate the way in which we feel. But you could also argue that almost everything is propaganda. Like when when when back a few hundred years ago, the first term propaganda was used in a in a benevolent way from the Pope, where he was trying to propagate or spread the news of of of the church. and that got obviously turned very dark when Yusuf Goebbels in in the 1930s was

John Jantsch (09:28.983)

Yeah. All right.

Owen Fitzpatrick (09:38.166)

minister for propaganda and then you know what happened there. But I think what’s really important to realize is that every organization out there, leadership effectively becomes a form of propaganda because you’re trying to organize and tell the story of how things work to your people. Marketing is certainly a form of propaganda because you’re trying to win the story war in the customer’s mind. And so recognizing it’s not necessarily seeing it as a nefarious or negative thing, but seeing

John Jantsch (09:40.972)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (10:05.945)

Propaganda is this is how we control the perception of things and understanding it’s what we do to ourselves all the time gives us an advantage in terms of understanding how we can do this in a good ethical way to make a positive difference to the folks we we’re marketing to.

John Jantsch (10:21.259)

Well, and and even inside of organizations, a lot of times the leader who has the vision, you know, needs to get everybody to understand and believe in the vision. And I I I’m sure a lot of folks that are listening today have had the experience of, I don’t know, maybe they went to a conference and they came back and said and said, Here’s what we need to do. We need to change the business and start doing X, Y, and Z and then watching the team just go, I I don’t get it. you know, is based on your framework. where’s the breakdown in that type of scenario?

Owen Fitzpatrick (10:51.523)

So I I think the problem isn’t that the team will go, we don’t get it. I think the problem is the team will go, yeah, we get it, but not actually believe in it. Right. We all know what it’s like, John, when someone goes, yes, and we know there’s zero chance of it happening. To me, that’s the problem. And so the reason the framework works so well is because we’re not giving them like that what what the leader’s doing in that case is they’re making sense. They learn something, then they come back and go, here’s what we need to do. We need to to change everything, and now we need to use AI.

John Jantsch (10:59.381)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (11:19.853)

Just AI. I want everyone to get on board. AI is going to be great for this organization, right? Let’s do it. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s the plan. Here’s the strategy. People don’t follow plans, they follow beliefs. So all of these people are sitting there going, so what I’m getting from you is you went to some fancy conference, you came back, you want all of us to get on the AI train where we know that the AI train is going to cost us our jobs. So you want us to buy into this? Sure, we’ll say yes, but there’s no chance of that happening. And so the leader in that case.

Is losing them because he’s not focusing on making it feel right. So if he wanted to, he or she wanted to make it feel right, then the strategy would be well, what is it that what is it, what are the emotional reasons why this would be something good for them? That’s number one. So what is it that we could that I could do to make them feel good about this opportunity? And number two, it’s just as important, who are they in a new AI world? Because if I’m a coder and you come back to me, John, let’s say I work for you and you say, Hey, Owen.

you know, I want you to be using AI more, we need to scale more, we need to use it more. If AI is doing the coding and I’m a coder, what am I now? Because now I’ve lost my identity because AI is doing my job for me. So what value do I even bring? And I think we forget that. We think here’s the logical reasons why you should want to use AI, but we’re not actually changing the way people feel and connecting it to who their identity is. So in that context, again, the leader should be thinking, how can I create or help them create?

An identity for them to move towards where they can see themselves thriving in a new AI world. And when you’re able to do that as a leader, when your vision isn’t just about your company doing well using AI, but it’s a a a vision which identifies how amazing it will be for your team and who they will become, that’s also gonna make it feel right. And then all of the plans or strategies you have around that, now all of a sudden you you go from compliance.

which you don’t really want as much as buy in, which you do want. And that moves towards commitment and conviction, which is the ultimate North Star you’re going for. That’s how I can I suppose look at those kind of mistakes we make and how feels right fits in and makes sense would actually make the most sense because it feels right and because it fits in with who they are.

John Jantsch (13:28.651)

I think that’s a great example because a lot of people are experiencing that right now. the you know, the AI adoption. What’s interesting that I have noticed is that there is a segment of pretty much everybody’s business that if feels right, fits in and makes sense. and then there and then you have a lot of people that are very threatened by it. And I think it’s that fits in. Well, maybe it starts with feels right, but it certainly hits the fits in box or hot button for them or doesn’t fit in.

So how do you I mean, so I’m sure a lot of business owners are struggling with this idea of you’re absolutely right. We that we need to educate more, we need to s figure out what’s in it for them. But then you have this part of your team that’s just taking and running with it. so you know, how do you kind of balance the whole the fact that people have different beliefs?

Owen Fitzpatrick (14:19.321)

So I think when you deal with someone who’s already taken and running from it, the reason they’re doing that is because before you even opened your mouth, for them, it already felt right. They’d they’ve already be feeling good about it. It already fit in with who they are and it already makes sense. I’ll give you an example. I I hired you know, a member of my staff who initially they’d done some part time work for me. And when they came on board, one of the things they said to me was, AI, I hate it. It it it caused me to lose my job the last time.

John Jantsch (14:27.819)

Right. Yeah.

That’s right.

Owen Fitzpatrick (14:48.961)

I do not want to ever have that happen again. And so what I did was I I got them to go in and I said, look, what I need you to do is I need you to make it so that you understand everything you can about AI. So for the first month, it was just them immersing themselves in that. And as they did that, I knew that as they did that, as that was their entire goal, it wasn’t I want you to use AI to do this for me. I was like, I want you to become a master so you know exactly what to what tools to use in what ways. They came back after a month and they were like a ninja. They could do anything.

John Jantsch (15:03.147)

Mm-hmm.

Owen Fitzpatrick (15:17.759)

And more than that, and more way more important, they started to see themselves as the kind of person that was amazing in in using AI. And so the main trick that I I feel is in order to make something feel right, and we’ll we’ll just give another example in the AI, there’s a psychological concept called psychological reactance, which is that whenever my autonomy is taken away from me, I’m gonna push back, I’m gonna demonstrate more resistance. Now, if you’re trying to create any form of change in an organization, one of the most important things is.

Is that let people feel like they’re a part of the change. Don’t just tell them, hey, by the way, John, you are changing. Here’s what we’re gonna do from now on. You know, I’ve just been to a it well, here’s the thing: it’s faster, but how good is speed when it doesn’t work, right? So you know, even if it’s faster, it still doesn’t get the job done. What does get the job done is to pull back and go, hey, listen, we’d love to invite you and let’s have a conversation.

John Jantsch (15:53.325)

Yeah, but that’s so much easier and so much faster. In the short term, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (16:10.701)

And the more you let them speak and communicate, the more you ask questions, the more you build curiosity in that way, and the more you then show examples of the possibilities, the more likely they are to come on board because there’s less reactants there. You’re not pushing them, you’re having conversations with them. And that to me allows them to get to the point where it starts to feel right. Cause before it feels right, it needs to not feel wrong. And it feels wrong when it’s pushed on me. It feels wrong when it’s in direct conflict to who I see myself as being.

John Jantsch (16:35.031)

Yeah, yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (16:38.475)

It feels wrong when it’s scary to me. It feels wrong when it might be taking over my job. And so those are the things we need to focus on first. How do we stop it from feeling wrong? And then how do we help it feel right? And that requires having conversations, which to your point, John, it’s like, why should I have to? There’s lots of stuff we should have to shouldn’t have to do, but being right is not enough. If you want to it to be successful and it to work, you need to make it feel right.

John Jantsch (17:03.895)

So we we’ve talked about the it it in your intro and certainly your your book deals with this idea of of belief systems in places like n you know, North Korea and corporate boardrooms in your own life. is the machinery in those settings different or are we talking about the same thing across all these contexts?

Owen Fitzpatrick (17:27.097)

Pretty much the same. I mean, we can generalize all day long and we can say this is the same and we can find nuanced differences, but ultimately the way in which the human brain is built is based upon the needs that our brains have. And our brains fundamentally have two primary needs the need for survival and the need for stability. The brain needs to survive, therefore, it will often have what we call a negativity bias as well as a drama bias. The negativity bias means we’re oriented to spend more time focusing on what we have to lose. And that’s obviously what every

John Jantsch (17:30.604)

Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (17:56.056)

Marketing professional will know is that if you focus on the problems and the pain points, often that will get you a lot of traction. And then also it’s dramatization. So the brain also needs to notice what’s a bigger deal than something else. So therefore, that’s the hyperbole that’s used often in terms of the news to get people’s attention. Once more, the more you hype it up, the more likely people are to pay attention. But the other piece is also important, and it’s important as well from a marketing standpoint, as well as from a mental health standpoint, as well as from a leadership standpoint. If I’m in a situation where

I’m trying to achieve a particular result and trying to persuade people, I have to know that the brain needs stability, which means it likes coherent stories that are simple to understand, which requires as little energy from my brain as possible. So that’s why politics works so well dividing us, is because it’s very simple to sell an idea that says, we good, they bad, us good, them bad, and repeating that over and over again by giving examples where we’re good and where they’re bad.

In the marketing world, that’s what we’re what what they’re doing. They’re ultimately speaking, taking this theory, this message, and they’re using very sophisticated messaging to continuously engineer the way in which people feel. I feel good about me and my tribe, and I feel bad about them. And this is etched into the way in which we think. We are tribal in terms of our mentality. We have you know, in the hunter-gatherer days, we needed to be part of a tribe in order to stay safe. So it’s very easy to get us.

to seduce us into seeing it and often believing a certain belief is the membership fee you pay in order to become part of that group. And so if from a you know influence perspective, you understand about that identity, you understand about the feelings, then it’s much easier for you to be very effective. So it happens in politics, it happens in marketing, it happens in leadership. And even in our own mental health, we tend to be dominated by our feelings, which dictate like I talked about earlier, what we’re focusing on.

John Jantsch (19:42.337)

Yes.

Owen Fitzpatrick (19:51.118)

And as a result of that, the same engineering that’s taking place in our brain is taking place in these huge nations that have been operating propaganda campaigns for for for so long.

John Jantsch (20:01.803)

Yeah, and it would be too easy to show some examples of current politics, us against them. so I’ll revert back to one of my favorite ad campaigns that Apple ran. you know, you had the guy the two the guy in the stodgy suit, you know, that was that was that was the PC and the hip cool guy that wore tennis shoes to work, you know, was the Mac. Like, here’s the enemy. You you don’t wanna be like them, do you?

Owen Fitzpatrick (20:17.197)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a Mac, I’m a PC.

Owen Fitzpatrick (20:29.579)

yeah.

John Jantsch (20:29.694)

it wasn’t quite as overt, but certainly that was the message, wasn’t it?

Owen Fitzpatrick (20:32.727)

It was that was one of the most phenomenal pieces of marketing. I h 100% agree. And what I loved about it was, you know, sometimes the the PC would be like, and then the other, you know what I mean, continuously freezing. And everything about it was just the identity piece. It was like, who do you want to exactly what you just said there, John, who do you want to be? And I think when when we see this in action, we don’t realize that this is something that from a marketing standpoint, the very best do, even if you’re a member.

John Jantsch (20:42.317)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (21:00.147)

there’s that ad of, you know, look at me, now look at him. It was the it was the old spice commercials with the guy who’s, you know, it was like, look at your man, now look at me. He could be like me too. And that whole that blew up, and that was one of the most successful commercials of all time and millions upon millions of views. But once again, it did so because it was very powerful from an emotional standpoint, and it also had an idea identity component. And so many of the purchases, particularly around you know.

John Jantsch (21:07.402)

yeah.

John Jantsch (21:10.657)

Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (21:29.609)

hygiene or particularly around what we wear are all oriented towards who do you want to become? What kind of person do you want to be? And I think this is something that from a marketing standpoint, the greatest legends in the marketing world all intuitively understand that. So what I’m trying to do is help people to understand this is what’s happening inside our head. And the more we understand the inner propaganda which is in all of our heads, that is all convincing ourselves of certain things,

John Jantsch (21:35.287)

Yeah. Yeah.

Owen Fitzpatrick (21:56.046)

The more we realize that for me to influence someone else, I need to make sure that the ideas I present feel right, fit in with who they are. And only then will it make sense because that’s what’s going to get through to their inner propaganda. Otherwise, the objections which are formed from the beliefs of their own inner propaganda will prevent them from ever doing business with us. And that’s kind of the core message that I’m trying to put across.

John Jantsch (22:18.093)

Awesome. Well I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by own. is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work and obviously your book?

Owen Fitzpatrick (22:25.059)

Sure, absolutely. So there’s innerpropaganda.com is where you can go. More information about the book. I’ve got endorsements. I was lucky enough to get endorsements from the likes of Robert Cialdini and Jonah Berger and Tony Robbins and whatnot and Daniel Pink. so there’s more information there. You can also put in your details once you bought the book and get a free masterclass with me in a free workbook. And I’ve also my website, ownfitzpatrick.com, and I’m on most social media. I have a podcast called Inner Propaganda Newsletter too. So innerpropaganda.com or ownfitzpatrick dot com.

John Jantsch (22:55.433)

Awesome. Well again, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll renate to you one of these days out there on the road.

Owen Fitzpatrick (23:01.518)

Thank you so much, Sean. My pleasure.


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Why Leaders Need Better Perspective, Not More Data

Why Leaders Need Better Perspective, Not More Data written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode 

Overview

Most leaders believe they see the whole picture. The trouble is, we all have blind spots. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch talks with international leadership expert Cornelia Choe, co-author with Marshall Goldsmith of The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently. Choe unpacks what she calls perspective blindness.

The conversation covers how AI has made data cheap but judgment scarce, why more than half of employees using AI never verify what it gives them, and the reasons senior teams often disagree on how ready their own companies are for change.

Choe introduces her GEM framework (Get up close, Establish meaningful bonds, Map your evolving perspective) to help leaders close these gaps before they cause damage. She also shares her personal history of moving from Minnesota to Seoul at age 10, and how that experience has shaped her thinking with regard to mental maps and blind spots.

This episode is for small business owners, agency leaders, and consultants managing teams through constant change. If you’ve ever assumed your customers, employees, or leadership team see the business the way you do, this conversation will challenge that assumption and give you a framework to address it.

Guest Bio

Choe is an international leadership expert, global keynote speaker, and Thinkers50 Radar honoree. She is the founder of The Leaders Alliance and has advised leaders at organizations including the United Nations and the White House. She is the co-author, with Marshall Goldsmith, of The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently. Choe grew up across eleven different places on three continents by age eighteen, an experience that informs her work on mental maps, cultural blind spots, and perspective in leadership.

Key Takeaways

  • AI made information easy to access, but it has not made judgment easier. More than half of employees using AI do not verify what AI gives them, and have made mistakes because of it.
  • Perspective blindness is the belief that you see the whole picture when you only see a piece of it. No single leader can track every change happening across a company or market at once.
  • Choe’s GEM framework offers three steps: get up close to people who think differently, establish a trusted relationship with them over time, and map how your view of the situation changes as a result.
  • Microtranslations matter. Two leaders can look at the same data and walk away with completely different conclusions if they never explain their reasoning to each other.
  • Outside perspective is one of the fastest ways to spot a blind spot, since an outsider will question “this is how we’ve always done it” in ways insiders rarely do.

Great Moments

  • [00:02] – John opens with the question driving the episode: what if the thing limiting growth is not what you’re doing, but what you can’t see.
  • [01:41] – Choe explains how AI has commoditized data and why that is dulling judgment, backed by survey data on employee mistakes and unverified AI use.
  • [03:53] – Choe defines perspective blindness and explains why no leader can track every change happening around them.
  • [05:00] – John and Choe discuss why there is no lasting “new normal,” just a series of short-lived ones.
  • [07:06] – Does perspective blindness apply to an eight-person business with no board? Choe says it matters even more for small teams.
  • [08:56] – Choe shares her personal story of moving from Minnesota to Seoul at age 10 and having to rebuild her entire mental map of who she was.
  • [12:06] – Choe introduces the GEM framework: get up close, establish meaningful bonds, map your evolving perspective.
  • [16:01] – A case study of a new CEO who nearly quit after conflict with a departed founder, resolved through a facilitated conversation with another former founder.
  • [17:25] – Choe unpacks microtranslations and how a 39 percent versus 7 percent readiness gap between CIOs and COOs shows up inside companies.
  • [19:15] – John and Choe discuss why outside perspective is one of the fastest ways to expose a blind spot no one inside the company can see.

Memorable Quotes

  • “The higher you go in the hierarchy, the less you hear of what people actually think and you hear more of what people think you want to hear.” — Cornelia Choe
  • “What we’re really lacking and losing today is judgment.” — Cornelia Choe
  • “Perspective blindness is a state in which we believe that we see the whole picture.” — Cornelia Choe
  • “Things are changing so quickly that the disruptors are being disrupted.” — Cornelia Choe
  • “When you get closer, you see the situation much clearer. And you’re able to find a lot more, many more solutions.” — Cornelia Choe

Resources



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John Jantsch (00:02.158)

So, what if the thing limiting your next stage of growth is not what you’re doing, but what you can’t see? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Cornelia Cho. She’s an international leadership expert, global keynote speaker, and thinkers 50 radar honoree. She’s the founder of The Leaders Alliance and co-author with Marshall Goldsmith of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Panoramic.

leader, how great leaders see differently. So Cornelia, welcome to the show.

Cornelia Choe (00:35.545)

Thank you so much, John. It is such a pleasure to share this conversation to be on the show with you.

John Jantsch (00:41.984)

So I’m looking at you in the camera right now in the mirror is is that the San Francisco transit system behind you?

Cornelia Choe (00:50.57)

It is not. It is a a map of it is a map of stars in the sky above Hawaii. Because it’s it’s there to help us really pinpoint what’s out there and to keep our eyes open to what’s moving across the sky and to know that there are always indicators out there if we look, we turn left and right and see.

John Jantsch (00:51.042)

What is it? What is that map?

John Jantsch (00:57.784)

Huh. okay. All right.

John Jantsch (01:16.874)

that’s that sounds like that sounds like a very intentional tie into your book somehow. And here I thought it was just a a poster, a piece of art. So y you know, your book is coming out at a time when business owners are probably more buried in data than ever, right? I mean AI tools and dashboards and customer analytics. So what still are we not seeing?

Cornelia Choe (01:20.556)

What’s around it?

Cornelia Choe (01:33.452)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (01:41.684)

No, John, it’s really convenient to get a lot of data today. And AI has really commoditized data. And for so long we’ve looked to leaders to give us the right information and for them to be chosen because they’re smart and because they have the right experience. And today this knowledge is really accessible at our fingertips.

John Jantsch (01:42.158)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (01:47.372)

Right, right.

Cornelia Choe (02:08.651)

But what we’re really lacking and losing today is judgment. And it comes both across the board with all employees using AI. And it really depends on how we use AI. We can take what we’re given for granted and move forward with that. But we have surveys showing that more than 50% of employees using AI have made mistakes in their work by using it.

That over 50% of employees don’t verify what they get from AI. And what that’s doing is really dulling our judgment. And just like after the Industrial Revolution, we’ve had to go to the gym because we’re not getting enough physical movement. We may have to then go to the mind gym to keep our senses sharp. And so this can happen across all employees in a company, but

Especially for the senior management team. What’s really tricky about AI and change, we’ve had so much change in the world today between economic and political upheaval, is that we’re not able to see how change affects all of our different team members. And they’re all changing in different ways, but we go forward thinking that everyone sees our company the way we see it. And we’re having a lot of

dysfunctions amongst teams. And there was another survey showing that CIOs and CTOs, 39% of them think their companies are ready. But in these same companies, COOs think only only 7% of CO COOs think that their companies are ready. So there is a massive disconnect there. So it’s

John Jantsch (03:53.336)

So you you actually have a term for this, I think, that you call perspective blindness. and so so let let’s define that. Tell me what it is. and then what does it look like when a business really has that without knowing it?

Cornelia Choe (03:58.156)

Yes, yes.

Cornelia Choe (04:08.673)

So perfect per perspective blindness is a state in which we believe that we see the whole picture. And today the problem is there’s so much change. There’s change happening all over to the left and to the right. And no leader can understand all of that change. We don’t know how it’s affecting all our different team members, and we don’t know everything that’s happening out there because there’s so much of it. And before change was really

Disruption of the status quo. We had the status quo, and then we had a beginning, a middle, and end of change, and then we had a new normal. The problem with today is that we don’t have a new normal. Before we can adjust to a change, another starts. We have tariffs, we have a war, we have supply chain disruptions, we have lack of access to materials that we need. And so the fact that we don’t

John Jantsch (05:00.76)

Well, so there is there is a there is a new normal, it just lasts two days, right?

Cornelia Choe (05:05.463)

There is a new normal the last two days, but it’s probably enough not enough time for us to feel comfortable and get used to it because we’re always looking for what’s changing next. And it’s it’s changing our state of mind. And so because so many things are changing, we’re not able to see everything. Everyone just sees a piece of the puzzle, which is why we need to bring together and understand different perspectives and kind of add those to our map, so to say, the way we see the world.

But when we think that what we see is the complete picture or that everyone else sees that way, we’re gonna make bad decisions. We’re going to we’re gonna assume that things are rosier than they are, that suppliers are gonna be able to deliver, that customers are always gonna be there. And let me share a story with you. I was talking to an exec an executive, and this executive was asked by senior management to hire someone.

Who was an expert at AI to improve their product and to work alongside them in a software as a service company. And this executive complied and hired this person, but then later got rid of them saying, Look, I’m the disruptor. And it’s it’s true that that person was the disruptor about a decade or more ago when software moved from CD-ROMs online.

And so that was a massive disruption. But today things are changing so quickly that the disruptors are being disrupted. And that’s really hard as a change in identity because where do we get our pride and our self-worth? It’s from what we believe we are: the entrepreneur, the founder, the disruptor. But things are changing so quickly that even disruptors need to constantly update their map to see.

to to stay with reality and what’s really changing around them.

John Jantsch (07:06.552)

Well, I I know from looking at your bio, you’ve worked with leaders at United Nations, White House, but does the same problem show up in your view w with that business that has maybe eight people, no board? I mean, does it look different?

Cornelia Choe (07:21.267)

Absolutely, John. I think it is even more relevant because when you’re working in a small company, you need to be extremely nimble. You need to pivot more. You need to keep your pulse on the market and on changes even more. And so I would say go and meet more of the customers, even if you find that you’re in a very stable niche, for example. There might be adjacent

Areas where you could expand your product or another customer segment that could be even more interested in your product. And things are changing all the time. So there are new opportunities being created, but you could also get disrupted very easily. So this matters even more to entrepreneurs. And I do work with a lot of founders. And and this is something that founders, I think, inherently do better, are better at at the beginning.

of their journey when they’re looking to find product market fit. But as we get more stable and we grow, then we need to continue to adapt both the company and of course our identities on what we contribute to our companies, which is which is hard.

John Jantsch (08:29.42)

Yeah. It it’s funny when you start out, everything’s a hypothesis, right? So you you know, you’re you’re willing to experiment and change, but yeah, you you get entrenched. In fact, one of the things you talk about, you mentioned the word map, and you talk a lot about this idea of mental maps that we operate from. So how how are these maps that that are ingrained, maybe from childhood or certainly from another point in your career, how do how are those creating blind spots, do you think?

Cornelia Choe (08:34.58)

Exactly.

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (08:42.103)

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (08:56.951)

So I’ll give you an example from my own life. I was raised in Minnesota until I was 10. And I had a pretty happy childhood out in nature, a lot of friends. And a lot of my friends were blonde. So I thought I was blonde growing up because when you’re small, you don’t think about it. You just think you are whatever you see. And then I moved to Korea, to South Korea, to Seoul when I was 10. And

John Jantsch (09:13.206)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:22.318)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (09:23.411)

I had the shock of my life. The first question I asked my mom at the airport was, where did they find so many people with black hair? And how do they get them all in the same room? I had never seen anything like that before. And I had to completely rewrite my map of who I was and how I was supposed to be. And I was promised a whole world of loving relatives who were waiting for me. That well, that wasn’t true. They were totally confused by who I was. They told me I looked Korean, but I wasn’t acting. And I

couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to act. And so we’re all, yeah, we’re definitely not enough and not not very well at all. And so we we all carry around inside an an operating system like an internal GPS guiding us on what works, what doesn’t, which we get from our successes and our failures that we’ve lived through.

John Jantsch (09:55.84)

I mean prob probably didn’t speak Korean, I imagine, at that time, at that point or in your life. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:12.013)

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (10:19.659)

And I we call this our internal map. And this is something we need to update. And for me, when I got to Korea, it it got really confusing until one time I saw an interview with an actress who was a single mother, and she was saying that she’s gone through a lot of moments of anger and sadness and joy. And it helps her become better at her craft and a better actress because she’s able to understand more of her characters. And I thought.

That’s my job. That’s what I need to do is to understand a lot of perspectives and the people around me and update my map. And it was only when I was willing to change my map and start to get to know people around me and how they think and how different it was and to absorb that myself, to be able to willing to, you know, to change how I see that I was able to make friends and really find a lot more success in.

John Jantsch (11:15.318)

Mm.

Cornelia Choe (11:17.801)

in every subsequent move. And I’ve lived in eleven different places around the world and three continents by the time I was eighteen. So I’ve had a lot of practice in this. But it it really helps when we adjust our map and our view to the world and the to the people around us, even if we don’t understand it at the beginning, which is true today.

John Jantsch (11:24.717)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:37.246)

Yeah. Th that’s really interesting you talk about travel. I mean, that to me has always been one of the most eye opening experiences as you experience other cultures in other places and you you, you know, you don’t know about them. So part of your mental map is is ignorance of, you know, other cultures and things. And so to get that that opening I’ve always found that that that really opens your eye d your your mind to new ideas. So we’ve talked a little about poked a little bit of what the problem is. how do we solve it?

Cornelia Choe (11:53.227)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (12:03.969)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:06.134)

Like all good consultants, I think you have a framework that you know, of how to approach it. So you want to unpack that a little bit?

Cornelia Choe (12:09.174)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (12:13.185)

Sure, it’s a very intuitive framework. And we call it Gem. And it stands for get up close, establish meaningful bonds, and map your evolving perspective. So that basically boils down to step one, where we’re actually willing to get up close to people who think differently. And there’s no pressure, just talk to them, hear their point of view. And we use a lot of

Curiosity and courage at this point, just to approach them and say, hey, you know, do you want to meet for a coffee? If that’s not possible or if it’s dangerous for some reason, then we can potentially read about them or talk to someone we know in common and just to get an idea of what they’re thinking and try to put ourselves in their shoes. And the problem a lot of leaders have is that the the when you’re a founder or a CEO, and the higher you go in the hierarchy.

the less you hear of what people actually think and you hear more of what people think you want to hear. And so creating a relationship of trust, which is step number two to really deepen this relationship instead of a one-off encounter and say, look, I’m happy to meet from time to time and to update your map according to what they see. That’s extremely helpful because that’s when you really get an understanding of what your stakeholders or the people around you are really thinking. And

John Jantsch (13:12.632)

Sure.

John Jantsch (13:16.182)

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (13:39.308)

That’s what helps you update your map, which is step three. If you talk about a subject in common, then you’ll be able to say, okay, this is where that subject is on my map. They see it differently. I’m going to add on to it. I didn’t know that this was possible. And I get this comment a lot in the circles I lead of leaders who are are chosen to work together into small circles because.

They think differently, not necessarily because they’re from a different background. You could be from the exact same town, but if you think differently and solve your problems together, then you you’re able to see so much more of so many more options and possibilities. And we we call this optimistic fear because it’s acknowledging that there is fear and there could be danger, but still using that fear to propel you forward to get close and

John Jantsch (14:13.74)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (14:25.942)

Mm.

Cornelia Choe (14:35.691)

To get more information to talk to people. And when you get closer, you see the situation much clearer. And you’re able to find a lot more, many more solutions. And to give you an example, I was working with a CEO who took over after the departure of a founder of a company. And we found out that this founder was still controlling some of the operations with through their relationship with employees that they’ve known for a very long time.

John Jantsch (15:02.539)

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (15:05.847)

And the the new CEO was extremely angry and was thinking of leaving. And they were really succumbing to fight, flight, or freeze and the fear of the unknown. What what’s gonna happen to this company? Because I’m not in control and who’s the real CEO. And so I paired them up with another founder who had just left their company, who had just sold their company. And

This CEO agreed to have a very open mind and just to be very curious during the meeting. And the CEO found that it’s so incredibly hard to leave a company. It this founder felt like they left a part of their body behind. And yeah. And were it was able to really patch things up with their own founder and bring the company to the next level of growth.

John Jantsch (15:51.032)

Well yeah.

John Jantsch (16:01.43)

So so when I heard you talking about the the framework and kind of week to week what that might look like for a business owner, I I I feel like we talked mostly about like people on your team, but that would really be true for customers too, right? I mean, so many of the conversations we have cuss with customers are we are providing a report, providing a service, checking in, it’s all transactional. But we’re not probably doing these things that could expand the map of how the customer actually views the world.

Cornelia Choe (16:05.495)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (16:13.803)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (16:24.471)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (16:30.976)

Or how or what they consider is value based on what we think we’re delivering value. Would you say that that that a business owner or an entrepreneur should probably include customers in those conversations, shouldn’t they?

Cornelia Choe (16:42.855)

Yeah, absolutely, John. I think we’re we’re looking at employees, but we’re actually looking at the realm of stakeholders in general because customers change and their needs change. And we may be able to fulfill a a different need and expand on our product, for example. And so this is a great thing to do in general, but all the more so because things are changing.

John Jantsch (16:50.849)

Right.

Cornelia Choe (17:08.159)

so much in the lives of the customers as well. So I would say get up close to your employees and your customers, but also f with your suppliers, your distributors, and even an influencer who you don’t know who’s far away, who’s bringing people to your products or not.

John Jantsch (17:08.227)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:25.726)

You you use the term microtranslations and and the idea that there could be some miscommunication there. And I’m thinking of like literal translations, right? In in when you’re trying to speak to somebody in another language, even like your intonation can mean something completely different. so I unpack that idea of microtranslations and how they show up in customer relationships, employee relationships.

Cornelia Choe (17:29.015)

Mm-hmm.

Cornelia Choe (17:41.835)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (17:50.398)

Give you an example of the survey where where it was found that 39% of CIOs believe the company’s ready, and only 7% of COOs believe that the company’s ready, they’re looking in completely different directions, and their plan of action is very different. So if we bring them together, then they’re really able to translate what they are thinking because.

John Jantsch (18:02.912)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:07.191)

Yeah.

Cornelia Choe (18:17.823)

If you bring them together, each one is gonna automatically assume that the other sees their perspective. And that’s when you really run into trouble. So starting from the basics where each person will explain how they see the the situation and explaining it in a way that the other person can understand. And that’s when you get the real magic, Jiang, because when you tr explain things in the perspective of another person so that they can understand and

So the COO will say, look, you know, I know you have a plan for your technology rollout, but we’re actually looking at these specific teams which are having a problem. How do they fit in your plan? And then to to translate what we’re saying in a way others can understand, that’s when we actually get the the co-creation and the and the communication. So it’s it’s it’s one added step, but it brings fantastic results.

John Jantsch (19:15.0)

What about outside perspectives? I know I get brought in quite often to organizations and you know there’s there’s leadership, there’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s customer service. And by the time I’ve talked to all of them, I realize that they’ve been they’ve been operating the way they operate, and it doesn’t make sense. and certainly there are disconnects. And it was so clear and easy for me to see when they were just like, Well, I don’t know, this is how we’ve always done it. Would would you say that bringing in outside perspective is a great way to to actually open some eyes to blind spots? Cause

Cornelia Choe (19:31.329)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:44.834)

I mean the problem with blind spots is we would fix them if we knew they were there. Half the time we just don’t know they’re there.

Cornelia Choe (19:49.387)

Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And a lot of people go on autopilot because it’s easier. And our brains are actually our most expensive organ because it takes up two percent of our body weight, but 20% of our energy and our oxygen. So people try to offload and autopilot everything they can because they don’t want to rethink it over. But in a time when we have constant disruption and our maps are changing constantly, then we have to question what we do and

John Jantsch (19:53.422)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:06.2)

Yeah, yeah.

Cornelia Choe (20:21.489)

it’s it it’s easier when we bring in curiosity and optimistic fear because then we’re willing to question and say, it’s not gonna be that big of a deal. Let’s just get a bit closer and see what we think. Let’s talk to these people, let’s call these people in for a meeting Monday morning, let’s make a list of people who aren’t at our table and to get to know what they’re thinking throughout the week.

John Jantsch (20:34.605)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:43.82)

Yeah, yeah. Well well, Cornel, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Is there somebody that or somewhere that you would invite people to connect with you or find out more about the panoramic leader?

Cornelia Choe (20:54.889)

Absolutely. My website is at corneliacho.com, C-O-R-N-E-L-I-A-C-H-O-E dot com. I would love to hear from you. And our if you want to learn more, our book is on Amazon and it’s called The Panoramic Leader.

John Jantsch (21:12.46)

Awesome. Well again, take appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Cornelia Choe (21:18.078)

Absolutely, John. It has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.


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AI Has Leveled the Marketing Playing Field

AI Has Leveled the Marketing Playing Field written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Episode:

Overview

Most small business owners assume neuromarketing and behavioral science are tools reserved for big brands with big budgets. In this episode, John Jantsch talks with Roger Dooley, author of three books on the intersection of brain science and business, about his latest release, The Persuasion Engine. Dooley explains why AI has effectively democratized decades of behavioral science research, giving entrepreneurs and solopreneurs access to the same persuasion principles once locked away in corporate nudge units.

The conversation covers how AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini can act as a stand-in for expensive consultants, applying frameworks from Robert Cialdini, BJ Fogg, and Dale Carnegie to everyday marketing tasks such as landing pages, emails, and competitive audits. Dooley also shares research showing AI scoring higher than humans on emotional intelligence tests, and explains what that means for writing customer communications that actually land well.

This episode is for small business owners, marketing consultants, and agency owners who want a practical, low-cost way to apply behavioral science to their marketing without hiring a research team. Dooley closes with a simple framework for running a first behavioral audit using AI in under an hour.

Guest Bio

Roger Dooley is the author of three books exploring the intersection of brain science and business, including his latest, The Persuasion Engine, which shows entrepreneurs and small business owners how to use AI-powered neuromarketing to understand and win customers. Dooley has spent two decades studying neuromarketing and behavioral science, and is known for his work on reducing friction in customer experience. He shares his insights regularly on LinkedIn, where he is most active on social media.

Key Takeaways

  • Neuromarketing tools once reserved for large brands, such as eye tracking and behavioral testing, are now affordable enough for any small business to use.
  • AI models can act as a low-cost substitute for a team of behavioral science consultants, applying frameworks from experts like Cialdini, Fogg, and Carnegie to a specific project.
  • A 2025 Swiss study found AI models scored higher than humans on emotional intelligence tests, with top models reaching roughly 89 percent compared to an average human score around 60 percent.
  • The most common mistake business owners make with AI is failing to give it enough context about their company, customers, and market before asking for output.
  • Treating AI as a conversation, rather than a single prompt and response, produces significantly better insights. Pushing back and asking follow-up questions is key.
  • Testing the same prompt across multiple AI models (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) can surface better results than relying on just one.
  • AI can be used to run a competitive audit, analyzing competitor websites, reviews, and messaging to find gaps and positioning opportunities.
  • Before sending an important customer communication, especially one delivering bad news, running it through AI for an empathy and clarity check can prevent costly missteps.
  • Adding the phrase “ask any questions that will help you respond” to a prompt often improves the quality of AI output significantly.
  • A first behavioral audit can start with adding company context, sharing existing marketing materials, and asking the AI to identify friction points and missing behavioral principles.

Great Moments

[00:01] – John introduces the episode and guest Roger Dooley, author of The Persuasion Engine
[01:27] – Dooley explains why we have entered “neuromarketing 2.0” as tools become democratized
[03:17] – How AI can apply Cialdini and Kahneman’s frameworks without requiring a thousand pages of reading
[05:19] – Research showing AI models outperform humans on emotional intelligence tests
[06:45] – Building an AI-powered “team of experts” using models like Claude or Gemini
[09:11] – A real example: using AI to audit a hypothetical pool service company’s competitors
[11:12] – How to give AI context so it reflects your brand voice rather than a generic tone
[16:09] – Why AI is surprisingly effective at predicting how humans will emotionally react to a message
[17:45] – The Duolingo CEO letter example and how good intentions can still land badly
[19:45] – Dooley’s framework for running a first behavioral audit in under an hour

Memorable Quotes

“AI is surprisingly good at predicting how humans will feel about a message, even though it can’t feel anything itself.” — Dooley

“It’s far better to do that as a conversation where you probe and you push back on it, because AI wants to please you and it’ll give you answers you don’t like.” — Dooley

“Most commonly it is not providing enough context, for one, about the company, the customers, the marketplace.” — Dooley

“You can create, using an AI model like Claude or Gemini, a team of your top experts, whoever you think are the most relevant to your particular project.” — Dooley

Why Video Marketing Builds Customer Trust in the Age of AI

Why Video Marketing Builds Customer Trust in the Age of AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Eisode:

Overview

Automation is everywhere in small business right now, from chatbots to email sequences to review requests. The question Doug Dibert Jr. raises on this episode is a pointed one: as you add more AI to your customer communication, are you accidentally making people trust you less? Dibert, founder and CEO of the white label video platform Magnfi, makes the case that video is the human layer that keeps automated systems from feeling cold, and that businesses adding short, personal video to their everyday communication are standing out and closing deals faster.

John Jantsch and Dibert get practical fast. They cover where video belongs after the sale, how to turn a four or five star review into a video testimonial that doubles as marketing content, and why a simple recorded reply on a form-confirmation page still surprises people. Dibert shares his Thank You Thursday habit, breaks down how AI video production now rivals shoots that once cost a fortune, and explains how agencies are packaging video as recurring revenue.

This one is for small business owners, marketers, and agency operators who already use automation and want it to feel more human without adding hours to the week. If you have wondered where video actually fits in a tech stack built on AI, you will leave with a short list of places to start.

Guest Bio

Doug Dibert Jr. is the founder and CEO of Magnfi, a white label video platform that helps marketing agencies and businesses add video to AI chat, email automation, and reputation marketing systems. With a background in filmmaking and years running a video production and marketing agency, He built Magnfi to give businesses video testimonial capture, branded video clips, video email, and AI-delivered video replies without the editing overhead. He works closely with agencies that resell the platform to their own clients.

Key Takeaways

  • Video is becoming the human layer over AI-driven communication. A short clip in a welcome email, a chatbot reply, or an SMS keeps a real person present as you automate.
  • Video chatbot replies work best as pre-recorded clips delivered by AI from a knowledge base at the right moment, not glitchy on-screen avatars.
  • Reviews can become a content engine. After a four or five star review or a high NPS score, invite a quick video testimonial and offer a small thank-you, turning happy customers into micro-influencers.
  • A personal video on your form-confirmation page still stands out, because so few businesses bother to confirm a submission like a human would.
  • Thank You Thursday: pick a random customer each week and record a short thank-you. It often reopens conversations and surfaces new needs.
  • Your current customers are your best audience for additional products. Social media nurtures buyers, it does not only attract new ones.
  • LinkedIn is a strong place for video right now if you want to be seen as an expert in your field.
  • AI video production has matured fast. Doug’s team produced a cinematic ad for an automotive repair shop that drew over 7,000 plays in two weeks.
  • For agencies, white label video slots in as an add-on to reputation, social, and web services, commonly at $250 to $750 a month in recurring revenue.

Great Moments

  • [00:02] John opens with the question behind the episode: is your new AI quietly eroding customer trust?
  • [00:51] The story behind the name Magnfi, including why dropping a single letter saved $5,000.
  • [02:06] How video shifted from “just content” to humanizing AI-driven communication.
  • [03:18] Why video outperforms text: nonverbal cues build know, like, and trust.
  • [05:54] Where video belongs after the sale, from welcome emails to chatbots to onboarding.
  • [08:31] Turning four and five star reviews into video testimonials with a simple incentive.
  • [11:47] Thank You Thursday, and how a weekly thank-you video reopens client conversations.
  • [16:22] The cinematic AI video example: a Mad Max style ad built around an air freshener.
  • [20:08] The first 90 days for a white label agency, plus why YouTube is the number two search engine.

Memorable Quotes

“What if every AI tool your business just adopted is quietly making customers trust you less?” — John Jantsch

“Video is a fantastic conduit for know, like, and trust in a digital-first world.” — Doug Dibert Jr.

“Your social media is also for continuing to sell to your current customers.” — Doug Dibert Jr.

“Your current customer base is the best base to sell additional products and services to, because they already know, like, and trust you.” — Doug Dibert Jr.

“That person took the time to record a video. You have no excuse.” — Doug Dibert Jr.



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John Jantsch (00:02.118)

So, what if every AI tool your business just adopted is quietly making customers trust you less? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance, and my guest today is Doug Dibert Jr. He’s the founder and CEO of Magnif Mag. I I bet you a lot of people struggle with that. Magnify. Well, he’ll he’ll straighten me out.

A white label video platform that helps marketing agencies and businesses add video to AI chat, email automation, and reputation marketing systems. So Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug (00:36.632)

Thanks so much. Yeah. No, no. It’s we’re we’re we’re we’re we’re marketers and salespeople. We’re not, you know, English majors, right? So

John Jantsch (00:43.91)

All right. So so tell everybody everybody listening how to actually pronounce it.

Doug (00:51.148)

Magnify, yep, yep, you got it. Yep, magnify, M-A-G-N-F-I, yeah. Well, it w I I I originally started it. I was gonna buy M-A-G-N-I-F-I, but somebody else owned it and they wanted five grand for the letter I. And when you’re a startup, right, I mean every dollar counts. So I was like, well, just take off the I, no big deal.

John Jantsch (00:53.484)

it says magnify, okay. Okay, all right. I was

John Jantsch (01:02.95)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I tell you the other issue I ran into. I I so wanted to pronounce your name like the cartoon. I was trying to put an L L in there, you know. I I so wanted to do that as Dilbert, but that’s okay, gosh. I should I should we start my intro over again? I just butchered everything. All right, so yeah, there you go. All right, well now.

Doug (01:17.704)

Yeah, I get that too.

Doug (01:22.882)

Yeah, yeah, I I get that too. It’s it’s actually diapers, but long eye.

It’s it’s perfect and it’s imperfection. There we go.

John Jantsch (01:39.364)

Now we have a reason to talk about it. So that’s a you know, that’s a marketing win. so you started as a video production company agency, and my guess is that most of your clients saw what you were doing or you sold what you were doing as content production. I I think that’s probably a true statement, right? how does Magnify actually look at video content differently?

Doug (01:40.97)

Yeah, there you go.

Doug (01:47.575)

I did, yeah.

Doug (01:56.63)

You got it. Yeah.

Right true.

Doug (02:06.734)

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So how we look at content differently, I mean, this is it’s a little bit of a metamorphosis, right? And a a lot of the metamorphosis for us really has been driven by the advancement of AI in a lot of communication. So video for a long time has been seen as just content. You know, social media, you gotta make video content, you gotta make those expert tip videos, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, which is all true.

John Jantsch (02:13.317)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:23.226)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (02:34.306)

But now it’s it’s even more important because it’s a part of humanizing business communication and AI driven communication now. That’s it’s it’s like the pivot has just happened not even that long ago. It’s it’s it’s definitely very interesting pivot, even for us.

John Jantsch (02:52.634)

Yeah. Well well, and I think the biggest change is what you’re suggesting, and certainly what I’ve seen, is that there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of gaps in where people are using it, video. Certainly, I mean, I I guess we could start with talking about, you know, how video differs from from word, written word content and maybe go there, you know, like why is video so powerful as a medium period?

Doug (03:11.405)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (03:18.008)

You got it. Well, it’s it’s it’s definitely more powerful than just text on a screen because you see let’s like right right now, we’re doing a video podcast, right? You’re hearing my voice, you’re hear you’re hearing my tonality, you’re you’re seeing my hands move. I’m a big hand talker. So you’re seeing my eyes get big with excitement, right? And then obviously you’re laughing. So just it we read so much nonverbal communication than we do.

John Jantsch (03:38.565)

Yeah.

Doug (03:46.242)

Verbal and we actually in science shows we learn more. So the businesses that are are adding video now to a simple email communication are are standing out in a huge way and closing deals faster. We worked with some sales teams that were super reluctant, like, I don’t want to take the time to record a video. I’m busy. I just want to fire off a quick, you know, email and then send it off. You know, keep the that sales prospecting thing going. But the businesses that actually levered it early on.

John Jantsch (03:47.205)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:08.677)

Yeah.

Doug (04:16.574)

actually close the deals faster because video is a fantastic conduit for no like and trust in a in a digital first world.

John Jantsch (04:23.898)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I think all communication is a form of persuasion. you know, we’re trying to persuade somebody to do something, you know, even if it’s just right back to me. and so I I think video scores very high on trust, and trust is certainly one of the biggest elements of persuasion, as you as you just mentioned. W I I read in the beginning of this some stats that that actually I think you you have shared. Seventy nine percent of Americans prefer human

Doug (04:30.754)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (04:45.75)

You got it.

John Jantsch (04:53.868)

Over AI agent and customer service, 86 say human interaction still matters to brain experience. I’m wondering if those numbers are skewed because so many people are doing it poorly. you know, so some of the automation, the really particularly the early automation was was more frustrating than helpful in a lot of cases. And they just found themselves like human, human, human, you know, pushing whatever button to get to that. And and do you think that that some of those numbers are there because

Doug (05:03.672)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (05:11.061)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (05:15.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:21.594)

People are doing it poorly. I know that I’ve had good experiences with AI chat and I I’m like, Great, that was the way I wanted to go because it I got the result. That’s really all we’re after, right? Yeah.

Doug (05:32.322)

Yeah, you got it. Yep, right to the end result. Yep.

John Jantsch (05:36.048)

So so how does I guess the second part of that, an actual question, you know, how you know, how is somebody using video in all these like customer experience and onboarding and you know, all the things that they think about that they don’t think about in a lot of cases after the sale?

Doug (05:54.03)

Correct. Yeah. Well, so after the sale, super important. So especially after the sale, letting them know that a real human being is actually behind the business is vitally important. So when they get that first welcome email, adding a simple video to it, even if this is generic, even in the chat bot, right? We’re seeing a a nice uptick in people adding video replies just to a chat bot. Because even after the sale, even for Magnify, when somebody comes in and white labels a platform,

John Jantsch (06:06.01)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (06:20.602)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (06:23.0)

They’ll come and they’ll still hit our chat bot up and just ask questions. So we just we deliver video answers to that. So adding video to that. So and then even social media. People businesses don’t think after somebody is sold, like their social media is just for attracting customers. Your social media is also for continuing to sell to your current customers, because if they bought from you, they’re probably liking your social media.

John Jantsch (06:26.693)

Yeah.

Doug (06:48.278)

So continuing to educate and nurture and onboard that customer into how to maximize out your product or your service that you have.

John Jantsch (06:57.914)

So so so give me a little give me a little bit on the technical details. When you say video in your chat replies, that’s really a a a bot that is replying in video form. I mean that’s not actually pre-recorded videos. A lot of people used to do that. but but you’re actually saying no, it’s gonna respond to the exact question it was asked based on a knowledge base.

Doug (06:58.186)

Even after the sale.

Doug (07:09.73)

You got it.

Doug (07:19.138)

Yeah, based on the knowledge base and delivering of a pre-recorded video. You got it. So that way I’ve seen the the bots out there that have like the automated like AI avatar and it looks really weird like the headljerk and then I’ll give you that text response answer. But these are pre-recorded video responses that are delivered by the AI at the right place at the right time.

John Jantsch (07:33.422)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:40.643)

Okay.

Doug (07:44.46)

So business can still we tell me this all the time, automate as much as you can, but when it’s appropriate, add in that video that that human layered response versus just a a talking bot. So what the bot is figuring out where the appropriate response is to add that video video reply.

John Jantsch (08:04.57)

So one of the things I think we talked about was at reputation management. you know, there are a lot of industries that have been on the, you know, getting reviews game for many, many years, home service industries, restaurants, spas, you know, that kind of thing. But it’s I think almost every business has now realized how important it is. how can you use kind of one what I call one-to-one video in referral generation, or not necessary referral, reviews like a Google review.

Doug (08:14.626)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Doug (08:31.586)

Yeah, review capture. Yeah. So a lot of softwares out there I know for reputation management. After somebody leaves a four or a five star or an NPS score leaves like a nine or a ten, now you could with with our platform, that’s how we work beautifully with those platforms. Is that if they do click those, you can automate either a gay, you know, click here and tell us your story, record a quick video testimonial about your experience. And hey, as a thank you for your time, you know, for for telling us your story, we’ll

Well send you 10% off the next visit, right? So that’s a perfect opportunity to create micro influencers out of those people who are leaving those those five stars or four stars and those nine and tens on the on an MPS score. So then it becomes a content generation engine.

John Jantsch (09:17.348)

Yeah. So so so again, just to clarify that, you’re not necessarily saying use it you know, a lot of people do things where they did a service and they want to send a video out to the person saying, Hey, review us. But you’re actually you’re actually advocating more for once somebody does review you to actually then ha use it as an engagement tool.

Doug (09:36.738)

Yeah, it’s actually both. Yeah, yeah. So it yep, you you could utilize it both ways. Like we we have users on our platform that’ll use our video email tool. So it’ll actually route them to a video message of the owner saying, Hey, like I’m Bob the from from Bob’s Burgers, right? Hey, I’m so glad you had a great time at at our place. If you feel so inclined and you want to tell us your story about how much you loved your burger, what was your favorite burger? Just click the link below and record your story for us. And next time you come in, you know, burgers on me, just for taking the time.

John Jantsch (09:38.479)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:06.566)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (10:06.732)

So we’ve seen it both ways. You got it.

John Jantsch (10:10.244)

many years I have actually advocated small business owners, you know how you you fill out a form, whether it’s request a quote or just contact us or whatever the form is, and and it always drove me crazy. You’d press that button, send, and you weren’t even I mean there was no confirmation, there was nothing. You’re like, I don’t know, did they get it? You know, or not, right? And I’d always was big on getting business owners to record a video, send them to a page that basically says, Hey, we got it, you know

Doug (10:11.51)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, small.

Doug (10:16.814)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (10:27.554)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:36.674)

Our best agent is on it, they’re gonna get back to you. Me and and the people that did that, it was funny how often we’d get comments because it it was it’s it’s now pretty regular, but it was unique almost so that you know, people would comment on something so goofy and so simple.

Doug (10:39.436)

Yeah.

Doug (10:51.406)

Well what’s what’s what’s funny is you were ahead of the game, John. And because what you were what what you were doing is you were humanizing the experience. Instead of shooting a simple e or even a even an email, just like you said, sometimes you get nothing back, but usually you get that automated little text like, We’ve got your thing, let’s let me be in touch with you, blah, blah, blah. But now, looks like you said, recording, I mean, taking three minutes or less to record a video, throw that in your auto response, and then

John Jantsch (10:56.921)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:07.045)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (11:20.162)

Having that video pop up? You were ahead of the game, man.

John Jantsch (11:23.79)

Yeah, well and and the fact that everybody the pandemic actually sped this up because everybody that everybody had to go out and get a camera and everybody got on video and everybody was used to now they had all these tools to actually do that recorded before. I mean when I started doing it, we had to bring a crew into the office. It was much harder. So

Doug (11:27.566)

yeah. Yeah. Video.

Doug (11:38.83)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I remember even even before the like just trying to get something out of Zoom call before all that was was super hard to do. Now it’s like we gotta walk across the street. well to Zoom.

John Jantsch (11:47.47)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So I think I read somewhere you do something called Thank You Thursday. you pick a random client e each week and send a personal video email. it’s so funny. Again, going back to old practices because I’ve been doing this a long time. I had a habit of of every Friday I would call three or four clients, literally with like, hey, I was just let’s see how you doing. And I can’t tell you how often somebody said, you know, I was just about

Doug (12:00.706)

Yeah.

Doug (12:14.926)

There you go.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:21.414)

call you, we need to do XYZ. I mean, it was unbelievable. So I made it a habit. So tell me about your thank you Thursday.

Doug (12:22.19)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you Thursday came well from you know from video email, right? ‘Cause like we talk about you should use video email, should do that. It’s kinda like practicing what you preach. So every Thursday, well, ’cause it rhymes, it kinda helps you remember it. yeah, thank you Thursday. You just pick a random customer and record a video and just say, Hey, how’s the su how it’s going on? Hope you’re doing fantastic and hope you’re enjoying the platform. You know, hope the family’s doing good. Just want to record a video to say, Hey, thank you. I appreciate you because I would not be here if you if we if we weren’t working together. So I just want to say thank you.

John Jantsch (12:38.469)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (12:56.474)

And less than twenty-four hours, if not maybe five to ten minutes later, you would get a response back saying, That was really cool. Thank you so much. And and a little what you just said, John, will happen. They’ll be yeah, well I thinking about adding X this Y XYZ thing on it. I’m glad you reached out. Let’s get this thing going. So it’s I mean, your your your current customer base is is the best base to re to sell additional products and services to because they already know, like, and trust you.

John Jantsch (13:21.412)

Yeah. Have you have you have you quantified or or or gotten even any kind of feedback from clients who’ve maybe adopted that practice to say this is what this has meant over the last six months?

Doug (13:34.466)

Yeah, mean l l literally what I just still what when I kind of explained that concept to our to our agencies and stuff like that that white label us even businesses, literally the same response is like, my gosh, this is so easy, so simple, especially from C suite people, like messaging out their their team members. Hey, I want to record your quick video or record a quick video and just say, Hey, you know, hey, you know, Bill. Just want to record your quick video, just let you know I think you’re doing a fantastic job. Thank you so much for working here.

John Jantsch (13:38.766)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.601)

Yeah.

Doug (14:01.56)

Especially if they’re talent they want to keep. People just wanna feel appreciated. So that C suite executive that was using our platform did that. He’s like, my gosh, like this is I’m gonna do this all the time now. Just record video, just say thank you to my team members who are doing a fantastic job.

John Jantsch (14:04.976)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:16.928)

th a lot of people have been, and any number of people have been using tools like Loom to do kind of similar one to one video and you know, you you just click a button and record. I I I know, you know, we initially our initial use case for using Loom was when we were trying to explain, say to a web designer, like, fix this thing right here, you know, and it was just a lot easier, right, to communicate that. How does your platform differ from a you know, a tool like that which can be free?

Doug (14:23.256)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Doug (14:35.372)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (14:45.58)

Yeah, yeah, no, Loom’s a fantastic platform. Yeah. So we we have the we just like you said, we have the we have the same kind of capabilities inside of Magnify, right? But the cool part about what what Magnify is is we’ve built in not just a a screen recording tool, but we have the ability to capture video testimonials, produce simple branded video clips, make little story videos which takes three video clips and produces them into one video, and then literally add video to any marketing communication that you have, whether you have an AI chat bot.

John Jantsch (14:51.718)

Ha ha ha.

Doug (15:14.942)

you have SMS marketing, add videos to that. So we’re kind like the the all-encompassing video powerhouse. And that stemmed when I was running my video marketing agency. It stemmed from what other digital marketers and what businesses were actually asking for on a consistent basis. So when you’re running a video production company, you’d get those nice big client contracts, right? Where you’re making 10,000-ish dollars a video. But

Magnify was birthed out of, well crap. Like I gotta make more I gotta I gotta figure out a recurring revenue model instead of always always hunting and killing that next thing. So that’s where it was kind of birthed from was the the tools, the five tools we have were birthed from what businesses use or and should be using on a regular basis. And then what makes us unique with the video communication tools is the video content creation tools. We produce it for you. So there’s no video editing needed.

John Jantsch (15:49.966)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:01.456)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:09.658)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (16:09.74)

So art it adds your your logo and music and captions and call to action all by itself.

John Jantsch (16:15.856)

Well in and that ten thousand dollar video, you know, AI is cutting into that budget pretty pretty significantly too, I think.

Doug (16:22.582)

yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. Well, it’s ’cause we we actually just through probably about a good year and a half, like obviously we’re we’re on we’d like to think we’re on the cutting edge of of video. And AI video being one of those. We we’ve seen it go from like the really terrible to where it’s at now and we’ve we have studied it and just started offering like cinematic style AI videos where it looks

Where it could replace a five million dollar budget video. We just did one for a multi location automotive repair shop. And they wanted like, they came to us, they wanted like a Mad Max style thing video built around a air freshener. Their big thing was like this cool air freshener that you that you hang on their their their the the mirror gives them 15% fifteen dollars off their next oil change.

John Jantsch (16:51.534)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

John Jantsch (17:10.67)

Mm.

Doug (17:19.81)

Gets it back of the door. they wanted a story built all around that. So we went, we we were like, okay, yeah, we’ll give you like a one that’s like around a minute and a half. But like once we got into it, we’re like, we made us like a two minute 30 30 second, like full movie trailer. I mean, complete with scenes. I mean, if you were to pay a crew your minimal five million dollars, and it turned out amazing, they dropped it on their social media.

And within two weeks got over seven thousand plays. And immediately we’re like, we want to do more. So we’re actually doing one that’s a a gone in sixty seconds theme mixed with back to the future. So that’s sort of getting ready to drop here pro pretty quick.

John Jantsch (17:50.256)

Yes.

John Jantsch (17:56.088)

yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I mean you imagine you imagine like, you know, two actual live trucks or something driving down the road, you know, in a Mad Max style. I mean, I would take f twenty people back in the day, right? All the people holding boom mics and and the three, four different videos on, you know, on trucks. I mean, crazy. So,

Doug (18:02.102)

It’s awesome.

Doug (18:12.366)

Yeah. It’s like my God.

Doug (18:21.85)

somebody who studied filmmaking in college, if I had this at my fingertips back in the day, like I mean, literally, like your the your imagination is only the limit. It’s so it’s crazy.

John Jantsch (18:24.411)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.696)

Yeah, yeah. All right, so I’m a two person shop and I don’t have time for video. What’s the least amount I could get away with?

Doug (18:42.712)

The least am I gonna get away with, right? That well, that’s what the Magnify platform was built for, number one. But number, but number two, bust out that phone in your pocket and just record some content for the love. Because I I always love when people you’re on screen, it’s been this is a great analogy I tell all people who are considering it. You ever been scrolling on social media and you stop and you see some guy’s video, you’re like, that guy’s an idiot. Like, I know more than that person.

John Jantsch (18:43.78)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (19:08.602)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (19:10.968)

Well, that person took the time to record a video. Well, you have no excuse. Start recording that content. Put it on social media, especially if you’re on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is so hot right now for video content. If they if you’re a LinkedIn person and you’re watching this, make video content on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader as an expert. There’s never been a better time to do it on LinkedIn, for sure. Hands down.

John Jantsch (19:14.277)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:21.296)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:34.596)

Although my soap speech, stop recording the videos in your car with you driving. I hate those, okay?

Doug (19:40.544)

Yeah. Listen, I’ve been guilty of those. ‘Cause like sometimes you’ll get that thought that pops in your head and like I wanna get it out before I forget. But I hear you. I hear you.

John Jantsch (19:52.778)

So so so so you’re positioning your program though or your platform as white label for agencies. so tell me a little bit about I don’t know the first ninety days of implementation for an agency, what’s that look like?

Doug (20:01.954)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (20:08.3)

Yeah, so first that’s the most important, right? The first ninety days. So the first ninety days when agency signs up, they they typically have a customer that they’re already like have asked for either video testimonials or they want to add video to an email marketing plan. And so that’s when they typically will find us, right? So but we tell agents all the time, yes, it’s exciting that you have a customer, right? And how our platform works is they pay that the the flat rate and then they get thirty they get thirty seats, thirty seats to give out to as many customers as you got it.

John Jantsch (20:23.675)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:33.284)

Hm. Wow. so those could each be a client could have a seat. I’ll get you, okay.

Doug (20:38.38)

Yeah, so you can give video testimonial capture, video email, branded video clips for your customer and add a layered in video service that works with your existing stack, your reputation marketing, your social media plan, your website design. But we tell them first 90 days, if you make sure you get yourself an optimized YouTube channel for your own agency. And because you agencies

John Jantsch (20:50.638)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (20:59.61)

Yeah.

Doug (21:04.477)

love the idea of having an optimized YouTube channel for their business because one, it helps out tremendously with SEO, right? I mean, and John, you’d be surprised how many agencies don’t know that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. And when we tell them that they’re like, what? Really? Yes, it is. So yeah, it’s a great way to sell your client into creating content. So the first thing is getting them to create content. Get a video testimonial from one of their happy customers.

John Jantsch (21:10.99)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:16.902)

Sure. Yeah. Has been for a long time. Yeah.

Doug (21:32.472)

But it’s implementing it in with their own tech stack, right? So when they approach a business and they go, Hey, check out what we’re doing here. This will work better. This will make work amazing for your business. The business goes, Well, heck yeah, that’s awesome. I want that too. And it’s an easy add on. And most agencies are charging between two hundred and fifty bucks to seven hundred fifty seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in recurring revenue. Right out the gate. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.772)

Right. Per se per seat. Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you stopping by, taking a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some where you’d invite people to learn more about w how they can try out Magnify?

Doug (22:11.02)

Yeah, we well obviously you can just go to magnify dot com, A G N F I dot com. And then always hit me and hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn. Just for just search Doug Doug Dybert J R on LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty much probably way too often, but you could f we could find me on there too. So

John Jantsch (22:29.318)

Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Doug.

Doug (22:34.072)

Perfect, John. Thanks for having me.


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The 4 Marketing Channels You Actually Control | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 5

The 4 Marketing Channels You Actually Control | 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – Episode 5 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Episode:

Overview

john jantschIf your biggest marketing channel disappeared tomorrow, how long before your pipeline dried up? For most small business owners John talks to, the honest answer is 30 days or less. That fragility is the hidden cost of renting your pipeline instead of owning it, and it’s the focus of Step 5 in the Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success series.

In this solo episode, John draws the line between rented channels (paid ads, search traffic, social reach) and the assets you actually control. Rented channels can produce results fast, but the rules change, costs climb, and a single algorithm shift can erase a healthy-looking business overnight. Owned channels work differently. You decide who’s on your list and what reaches them.

John walks through the four channels every small business can own: email, referrals, strategic partnerships, and direct human relationships. He shares a simple owned-versus-rented audit you can run this week, plus why the human element only grows more valuable as AI takes over the routine work. This one is for small business owners, marketers, and consultants who want a pipeline that holds up when the platforms shift.

Host Bio

John Jantsch is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing and host of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. He is the author of several books on small business marketing strategy, including Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine, and The Ultimate Marketing Engine. He helps small businesses build practical marketing systems that produce predictable growth.

Key Takeaways

  • Test your risk fast: if your biggest channel vanished tomorrow, count how many days before your pipeline dried up. For many owners, it’s 30 days or less.
  • Rented channels (paid and most earned media) can scale instantly, but costs rise, rules change, and you never control them.
  • Owned means control. You decide who’s on the list and what reaches them, with no platform getting a vote.
  • Run the audit: list every lead source that produced revenue in the last 12 months, then mark each one owned or rented. If rented tops half, that’s your next area of work.
  • Email is your most direct owned channel, but only when the list is qualified, nurtured, and built with permission. It’s a content channel first, a sales channel second.
  • Write every email as if it’s going to one person, not 20,000. Personal beats broadcast.
  • A real referral system has three parts: a specific ask, a specific moment, and an easy path. Most businesses only do the ask.
  • Strategic partnerships with non-competing businesses serving your same ideal client are the most underused lead source for small businesses.
  • As AI handles more routine work, double down on the human channels: networking, speaking, associations, and in-person participation.

Great Moments

  • [00:01] John opens Step 5 and poses the test: if your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, how fast would your pipeline dry up?
  • [02:07] Renting versus owning explained, why the rental model is fragile, and the owned-versus-rented audit.
  • [04:30] Channel one: email, and why it still works after years of people declaring it dead.
  • [06:52] Email as your first layer of content, not just a sales tool.
  • [07:12] The mindset shift: write to one person, not a crowd.
  • [09:33] The three parts of a referral system, then why strategic partnerships are so underused.
  • [11:49] Channel four: direct relationships, and why the human element matters more in the AI era.

Memorable Quotes

  • “If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, how long before your pipeline would dry up? For most folks I meet, it’s 30 days or less.”
  • “If you own it, you control it. You decide who’s on it and what reaches them.”
  • “Referrals arrive pre-trusted. They close faster and they’re less price sensitive.”
  • “Non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are the most underused lead source a small business can have.”
  • “The more AI becomes part of our lives and businesses, the more the human element matters.”



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John Jantsch (00:01.708)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and again, no guest. I’m doing this series of seven steps to small business marketing success. This is actually episode number five. So go to the show notes. You can find all the other episodes if you are behind on this. but I’m gonna dive into episode or step number five. and this one really talks about pipelines. Having a great, healthy pipeline is awesome, isn’t it? Unfortunately,

many people don’t own their pipeline. And this is going to be easy to test. I’m gonna really talk that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. But if if let me ask you this. If your biggest channel disappeared tomorrow, the platform shuts down, alg algorithms change, cost doubles. how long before your pipeline would dry up? be honest. most of the folks that I encounter 30 days or less. and that’s really risky, and that is the cost of

Renting versus owning your pipeline. And I I want to talk about a little bit about those terms. If you own it, that means you control it. you decide who’s on it, what reaches them. no platform’s really going to change that is going to to to really make that go away. That’s that’s the true idea of owning. So I mean, you own your website, you own your email list, you own your social media.

To some degree, although those are really controlled as well. So I want to get into some of the things that I believe if you want to truly own your pipeline, you have to actually own all the assets that drive your pipeline to the extent that you can. Now, when you hear marketers talk about owned media, earned media, paid media.

When I’m talking about renting, really that’s what paid media is. And to some degree earned media, which is great, the publication writes about you. some

John Jantsch (02:07.638)

search platform sends traffic to you. Yeah the social media platforms, you know, people follow you and you know on YouTube or something and and then click over to your website. Those are all things that you you kind of earn mentions. But again, those are really not under your control. I mean those are things that could theoretically go away tomorrow. YouTube changes their algorithm and you no longer get any traffic from it. so that’s why I want to focus on this idea of own. you know someone else

on in on most pipeline, rented pipeline, somebody else owns it, you pay for access to it, you play basically by their rules. and and the the beauty of that, of course, is that that can happen instantly. If you’re a new business and you go to Google AdWords and you open an account and you start advertising, I mean you can actually generate pipeline, you know, immediately. But as many people have experienced, that pipeline

Can get more and more expensive every single year, less and less profitable every single year. they change the rules, and all of a sudden you can’t talk about your product or service in the way that you want to in your ads. I mean, there are all kinds of things that that are there. and a business and and the challenge is this rental model is very fragile, but it can be invisible too, right? A business can look very healthy.

Be chugging along, but it’s 70% of their pipeline, 70% of their customer growth comes from rented channels. And all of a sudden, you know, they disappear overnight because something changed. So here’s a here’s an audit that I would tell you to do. You can do this live. lift up list every lead source that’s produced revenue for you in the last 12 months. And I know sometimes that’s hard to attribute where the revenue came from, but

Spend some time thinking about where your revenue comes from, what lead source, and start marking: is this owned? Is this rented? or you know, rented is the same as paid. you know, and and really kind of look at what’s the ratio. All right. So I want to talk now. Now that you’ve done that, I’m gonna talk about the the the four owned channels and why you need to really put more emphasis, probably.

John Jantsch (04:30.828)

need to put more emphasis on those and less on the rented ones. So the first one is email. I’ve been around for a very, very long time. We started, we started, I think, heavily using email right at the end of like in the 90s, 97, 98, 99, all of a sudden email became a thing. everybody was, you know, really adopting it. And I swear, you know, once people, once people learned the marketing

value of having an email connection with somebody. Of course they started abusing it. And that’s why a lot of people have then declared almost every year from about 2000 and well, let’s say 2004 or so when social media started cropping up that the email was dead. How many times have you heard that one, right? At least for 15 years. But it still works. It’s still one of the most valuable channels. and I

contend that it probably will remain. Now it it it has gotten harder to make effective. and that’s really more because people have abused it and because people have other options that that they’ve spent on. And you know, there’s so much spam and cold, you know, outreach that comes through those that have have actually made people, you know, not like email, if you will, but but a qualified email list that you have built over five years, direct, reliable,

owned is really one of the most efficient channels that you can have. But again, qualified, nurtured, not abused, members of that list can can be really one of the most valuable marketing assets that that a business has. key word again, qualified. people asked to be on it. It was not scraped, it was not bought, it was not added. this is

This is actually your first layer of content, if you think about it. The principles that make content work apply. Genuine point of view, useful, specific. So when you’re sending email out, that is part of your content plan, right? So genuine point of view, built on one of your core principles, built on one of your hub page, one of your

John Jantsch (06:52.0)

elements that you’re using in all of your marketing, all of your content. Ca email in a lot of ways is a content channel. It’s not necessarily a sales channel. It certainly can be. You can earn the right to sell very directly in email, but it is first and foremost, it is a content channel.

John Jantsch (07:12.278)

And again, you know, a lot of I think a lot of people, partly because of spam and things that have gone on, you know, feel like, you know, email doesn’t feel that exciting anymore, right? And I think that that’s a lot of times the edge. you know, the the the real and and again, I’m not talking about necessarily all the ways that people are using it and abusing it. I’m talking about the ways that you have the ability to have a direct conversation. And that and that’s you know, that’s probably one of

It’s one of things I forget all the time, but it’s probably one of the core principles of email is we feel like, okay, this email is going out to 20,000 people. So we’re writing it like it’s going out to 20,000 people. What if you wrote it like it was going out to one person? That you told a personal story, that you were vulnerable, that you shared a a a point of view that might not be accepted by everyone. That’s how you have to think about all of your writing.

You’re writing it to one person. Whether it’s a YouTube video, an email, a social media post, it’s not, hey guys, hey everyone listening. It’s hey, you one person, I wrote this directly for you, or at least you’re gonna feel like I wrote this directly for you. That’s how you make email, certainly a potent channel. I wrote an entire book about this second channel called the Referral Engine. and I’m

Happy to say that that book has remained evergreen because the referrals are not some hack that come about because of the next platform. They are genuinely earned if you actually focus intention on them. Obviously, you’ve got to do good work to get referrals. But after that, if you are intentional about how they are are created, referrals are they’re probably for most of us, they are the best leads. they already

arrive kind of pre-trusted. they close faster, they’re less price sensitive. They’re more likely to refer other people because that’s how they came to you. most small businesses, I think most small businesses, hopefully you do, receive some referrals, but they happen accidentally. that’s hope. That’s not a system. there are three parts to a an effective referral system. There is a specific ask, there is a specific moment.

John Jantsch (09:33.738)

And there is an easy path. So here’s what I would here is who I serve and I would like what I would like you to do. you do that at a moment when the client or the yes, the the client or the you know, the person, it’s the right time to ask them. It’s it’s the moment of truth, as I’ve called it before. And then you make it very easy for them. Most businesses are missing two and three. I mean, they think about like, yeah, okay, I I’m

Gonna go out and ask people for referrals, but I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna have it as a planned moment. I’m not gonna have it make sense, I’m not gonna actually make it really easy for them to do. You add those two pieces of it, and you know, right after the customer experiences something good, you make you make that ask land right then and you make it easy for them to do. Now, the the third channel is that you can own.

Is one that is a branch of referrals to some degree. not exactly. and that’s partnerships, strategic partnerships. I don’t know why more people don’t spend more time on this particular channel. non-competing businesses serving the same ideal client are are probably the most underutilized, underused lead source that any small business can have. And it’s it’s not even close. I built in the early days my entire following, my entire business.

My entire platform around these strategic partnerships because it was so easy for me to take the fact that I was early on producing content and others, people started realizing we need content, we need to educate, we need to bring our communities together. And all of a sudden I was a ready-to-tap source. And so they put me in front of their audiences. So the ideal client.

Every one of your ideal clients needs other professionals. every one of your ideal clients has other needs. If you’re in the home services business and you are an electrician, they also need a painter and a plumber and a roofer and a person to do landscaping. so if you could start to develop relationships with all the people that also serve your ideal client, and you can activate those relationships.

John Jantsch (11:49.54)

have them if if you have a podcast, have them on your podcast, you be on their podcast, write content for each other. There’s lots of ways that you can actually start developing these relationships so that these strategic partners then have a have a a real reason, but also your top of mind when it comes to referring you. And then the fourth one is is still just direct relationships. The more AI becomes invasive.

Is that the right word? In our lives and our businesses, the more human element is going to become important. So if you’re using AI to actually become more efficient and to free up time, take that extra time, take your team’s extra time and start doubling down on networking, on speaking, on associations, on in industry, in person industry participation. Spend more time doing those kinds of things because.

those still pay off and they they’re gonna pay off I think even more as people try to automate and and have you know robots theoretically doing their content. I I still don’t know that we’re ever gonna actually get to that point. But I think the real opportunity right now is to double down on the human content. So do that owned versus rented audit. Do it this week. if rented is more than half then really

The owned growth engine is really the work that you need to focus on. So this is step number five of the seven steps to small business marketing success. Hopefully you’re enjoying this series. You can go to our website at Duct Tape Marketing to find the rest of the episodes or the rest of the steps in this. and and obviously six steps six and seven are coming. These are all if you just want to get the ebook all in one shot.

It is dtm.world slash seven steps. you can get it for five bucks. if you want to actually talk to one of our consultants, it is duct tapemarketing.com consultation. So if these are making sense, that actually next step might make sense for you. Go grab the ebook or go grab a a strategy call with one of our advisors. All right. Thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.


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Your Marketing Probably Has All the Pieces. Here’s Why That’s Not Enough

Your Marketing Probably Has All the Pieces. Here’s Why That’s Not Enough written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Most founders who’ve been at this for a few years have pieces.

Some strategic clarity. A decent presence. Content running, mostly. Owned channels being built. Customer work happening somewhere.

The pieces are disconnected. Nobody owns the full picture. Different parts run on different rhythms. Reporting covers what each piece did in isolation, not whether the whole thing is moving.

That’s an assemblage. Assemblages are fragile in a specific way.

What makes an assemblage fragile

The founder gets pulled into client work for a month and it frays. A key person leaves and part of the picture walks out with them. A new tool shows up, gets bolted onto the existing structure, and the whole thing gets more complicated without getting more effective.

I use a simple test for this: if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, could anyone in your business run the marketing for 6 months? If the answer is no, the system isn’t installed. The assemblage is being held together by you.

A Marketing Operating System is the opposite. Integrated, documented, connected, running on a rhythm the business can maintain with or without the founder’s constant attention.

The four components

Integration

Strategy, messaging, the engines, and the Hourglass diagnostic all connect to each other. Nothing sits in isolation.

When the strategy updates, the messaging updates with it. When the Hourglass surfaces a gap at Trust, the Brand Engine responds with specific work. When the Growth Engine tests a new offer, the Customer Engine updates onboarding.

In practice: one source of truth for strategy and messaging, engines that are explicitly defined and visibly connected to that strategy, and a shared vocabulary the whole team uses. When any of those are missing, changing one thing doesn’t change the things connected to it. The system drifts.

Cadence

Most small businesses have emergencies and campaigns. Cadence is different.

What it looks like in practice: a 30-minute weekly review covering what shipped, what moved, what’s blocking. A 60 to 90-minute monthly performance review against the 3 engines. A half-day quarterly planning cycle. A full-day annual strategy refresh.

Cadence is unglamorous. It’s also the most reliable predictor of whether a Marketing Operating System survives or decays over time.

Measurement

Five to seven metrics connected to business outcomes. Brand Engine: presence health, content engagement, list growth. Growth Engine: inbound volume by channel, conversion by channel, owned vs paid ratio. Customer Engine: repeat rate, referral rate, customer lifetime value.

Reported consistently, in context, against a goal. A report that tells a story: what happened, why it matters, what we’re doing about it. Not 16 numbers in a spreadsheet that nobody changes a decision based on.

AI as a leverage layer

This is where AI actually belongs, and most advice on this is either too enthusiastic or too dismissive to be useful.

AI can’t make strategic judgments about your market, your customer, or your business. It can’t produce your point of view. The thinking is still your job.

Where it does belong: research, production, reformatting, analysis, and the communication mechanics layer (follow-up, scheduling, first drafts). Installed on top of a working system, AI compounds advantage. Installed in the absence of one, AI amplifies the confusion that’s already there.

That distinction is the one most founders aren’t being given clearly right now.

What it looks like when it’s working

A professional services firm I worked with did the Founder Portrait work, rebuilt around a single service line, installed Strategy First, built out presence, content, owned channels, and a Customer Engine, then ran the full system for 2 years.

Revenue up 60% on lower marketing spend than before. Paid acquisition dependence cut significantly. Meaningful recurring revenue from the Customer Engine. And the founder can step away for 2 weeks without the system breaking.

Because it’s no longer being held together by his attention.

That’s a Marketing Operating System.

One thing to do this week

Do the bus test honestly. Write down everything about your marketing that only you know. Who the real ICP is, because the document is out of date. What the actual priorities are, because the quarterly plan never got finalized. Which conversations are in progress.

Whatever ends up on that page is the gap between the assemblage and the system. That page is the first draft of the Marketing Operating System document.

The Marketing Operating System is the final step of a seven-step framework I’ve been refining for over 20 years. The full system, from the Founder Portrait through the MOS, is in my new ebook, “7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success.” Get it at dtm.world/7steps.