nadosi.com

John Jantsch (00:00.942)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is John Grabowski, Jonathan Grabowski. He’s the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Pengey, an on-demand graphic design platform that provides businesses with unlimited custom design services at a flat monthly fee. Pengey connects clients with top tier designers, delivering completed projects within 48 hours.

So we’re gonna talk about design, graphic design, and maybe how AI is impacting that industry as well. So Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Johnathan (00:35.032)

Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been a fan and we’ve known each other for some time now and excited to explore the podcast and any questions that you may have.

John Jantsch (00:43.982)

So I started to introduce you as John. I don’t think my official name is Jonathan. I’ve always just been John. Is Jonathan always been your thing or did it ever get shortened?

Johnathan (00:54.24)

Yeah, so yeah, so my there are probably about like three people on planet Earth that call me John like every day. My mother who unfortunately passed away about five ish years or so ago was very, particular about Jonathan and pretty much corrected them and scolded them anytime anybody ever said John. So I’ve always just been Jonathan, you know.

John Jantsch (01:00.206)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:11.799)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:17.09)

Yeah. Well, you know, we, share a Kansas city connection. So I’ll share this story. I was listening to a sports announcer who was calling our quarterback Pat Mahomes. and the other announcer says his mother has scolded me frequently. is Patrick. so he shares that as well with his mother. So

Johnathan (01:33.002)

Nice. That’s great. And I do have a little bit something over you being that we beat you guys in the Super Bowl this past year.

John Jantsch (01:43.83)

Yeah, that wasn’t very fun to watch, I’ll give you that. the name Pengey, it’s probably on your website somewhere. Anytime I see like a kind of a different, unique name, was there some story behind that?

Johnathan (01:47.415)

Heh heh.

Johnathan (01:59.318)

Yeah, great question. I don’t really share too much about it because people aren’t as curious as you may think. So when we first started, we had this idea of like, well, if you were to slow down the name PNG, you would ultimately lead to a particular file extension that is related to graphic design.

John Jantsch (02:05.38)

No, that’s true.

John Jantsch (02:23.31)

Huh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. What is that programable network graphic or something? I can’t even remember. Yeah.

Johnathan (02:28.811)

And so.

Yes, exactly right. So it’s pretty much PNG. Now, PNG speeding it up, of course, and that’s related to the graphic design. So although we are originally a graphic design company, we’ve kind of morphed into more of like a creative services that expand well beyond, but kind of paying respect to the graphic design aspect that it is PNG, but it technically came from PNG.

John Jantsch (02:56.612)

Well, now I’m really glad I asked that question because that’s a great story. know, a of times people are like, yeah, I just saw it there. heard it and I thought it sounded cool. The domain was available, but that’s a great story. All right.

Johnathan (02:59.992)

Yeah.

Johnathan (03:04.959)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we, I remember very vividly, it was like 12, one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning when my co-founder and I were talking about it we’re just like, you know, putting things together and that was the one that stuck. So.

John Jantsch (03:17.156)

That’s awesome. So was there any particular vision? Like, you know, a lot of people start companies because like I couldn’t find good graphic design myself. So I started a company. there, was there any story or vision like that?

Johnathan (03:30.166)

Yeah, I would say…

I’m not a graphic designer. So, and we were a digital marketing agency. We sucked. Um, we probably didn’t use the duct tape marketing system, uh, in order for us to grow. Uh, we were terrible. So we basically, uh, but the one thing that people always said was we were really good at graphic design. And then we decided to kind of like niche down and say, this is our, this is what we’re selling. We turned it into a product high service.

and it obviously focused very heavily on graphic design. Obviously now it’s a little bit more expanded beyond just graphic design as the world of AI and marketing as a whole, it becomes necessary. finding people, finding reliable people, hiring people is a pain in the absolute butt. It’s terrible. I don’t like hiring people simply because of

There’s so many aspects of it. The emotional aspect is this person a good product fit into the culture of the business? Are they actually good at their job? Are they just telling you that they’re good at their job even though they’re not good at their job? I mean, there’s a lot of fundamental factors. So like what if there was a solution where you could go onto a website, hire immediately and find and talk to somebody who is reliable and good, inherently good at what they could do and can pretty much turn things around within the timeframe that you’re looking for.

That is really the ethos behind Penge and how it started. It’s just like, we got good at one particular thing. We got credit for it, turned it into a business and here we are today.

John Jantsch (05:08.285)

And I think the last time you and I talked, I mean, it’s not just you and another person sitting around a room anymore, right? I mean, it’s you’ve built quite an organization.

Johnathan (05:16.95)

Yeah, I mean, at this point, we have over just about 500 people and we have thousands of customers all across the country, all across the world. And the problems that I had then, just getting it off the ground, now the problems are completely different. And they’re more meaningful and impactful because if you make a mistake, you have lives of other people that are going to be hurt or be

better off because of your decision making. then so it’s just systematically you have to become more systematic and more thoughtful in your approach to every day rather than just kind of be like, hey man, what are we doing today? Like

John Jantsch (05:56.632)

Right. So, you know, I’ve preached for years strategy before tactics. A lot of people view even design projects, know, we need a brochure. We need a banner. We need a logo. And there’s really no thought given to it. It’s just like, yeah, okay. I like that one. How do you help businesses kind of establish maybe a brand identity as opposed to just doing one off projects?

Johnathan (06:21.09)

Yeah, I mean, that’s actually a pretty hard thing because a lot of times our customers don’t necessarily have like they primarily most of our customers already have existing brands in addition to they are actually digital marketing agencies. So from like a business standpoint, we assess it no differently than a than a typical project. The core differentiation, in my opinion, if you were to hire like a service like PENGIE versus that of like an agency, an agency is probably going to be able to sit down and talk to you and kind of go over like the fundamental

John Jantsch (06:32.398)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.852)

Yeah, give you a creative brief. Yeah.

Johnathan (06:48.696)

Correctly. Creative Breeze can talk to you for several hours and be able to do that. We’re very factual with what it is that you’re looking for and we’re very project oriented or visual oriented. So if you have a new company, it’s the art director’s job to find out more about your company. And then you have to provide us a visual. And what I found personally is that, and maybe you could attest to this too, John, like, if somebody just tells you, I want this and you’re like,

Well, what the hell does this look like? correct, correct, correct. That is like literally the worst thing that you can say on planet Earth. Like, I know when I say, OK, well, that’s really nice to hear that. But like, listen, bro, I need something in your brain. I need a sliver of your brain to understand what the hell you’re trying to do. So we start there first. And if you can’t provide a visual, to be honest with you, we don’t really want you as a client.

John Jantsch (07:20.356)

I’ll know it when I see it.

John Jantsch (07:41.656)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johnathan (07:48.248)

Because like you’re going to fail in Pengey. And honestly, like that’s the biggest piece of Pengey’s success and lack thereof is the the customers not communicating efficiently and effectively. And you would be surprised at how bad at times entrepreneurs and business professionals are at communicating. And what I found is that the designers are actually the best like

the teams aspects like the when a designer works at as a customer works at Pengey, they’re the best customers because they have the empathy and the understanding that is needed to articulate a project. Whereas like a founder is very like, I need this done, I need it done tomorrow, I need it done right now, and it needs to be done, you know, in 1080p, the 18 different styles and please give it to me ASAP. Like, and those are great customers and they can work but.

John Jantsch (08:18.404)

you

Johnathan (08:45.032)

communication is so, important.

John Jantsch (08:49.39)

So do you find that you either you don’t, I mean, you fire that customer or do you find that you are moving a little more towards being a consultant on brand strategy?

Johnathan (09:03.33)

Yeah, think there’s a well, so number one, my claim to fame is that I fired more customers than people. And I’m very quick to be able to say, listen, this isn’t a good fit. And it’s OK. I think I think that discipline is really important when it comes to business. If you focus all of your time and energy on the loudest customers and problems, I don’t think you will ever complete anything ever because you always just be putting out fires.

John Jantsch (09:24.141)

Yes.

Johnathan (09:31.01)

But when it comes to the consultancy, yeah, I think that’s like a core differentiation between us and like probably our competitors is that there’s a human aspect. And I think that’s like the approach that we’re looking for is the human element of talking to our customers, understanding them, getting, letting them know that the project is completed or the project is being worked on. And that is kind of like the differentiation between us and like AI. You can easily use AI.

John Jantsch (09:57.506)

Mm-hmm.

Johnathan (09:59.254)

And it works great. Like we use the AI at Pengey all the time. But I think the reason why you sign up for a service like Pengey is because you want that human interaction.

John Jantsch (10:09.828)

Do you have, and I do want to dive into the AI a little bit. I didn’t want to go straight there though. So set the table a little more. Do you have any examples of that you can think of and you don’t have to share names if you don’t want to, but where the work that you’ve done, your team’s done has kind of significantly impacted a brand’s perception or maybe even success.

Johnathan (10:31.606)

Yeah, there is a two things, a very, I’ll try to say it without saying it, very reputable university and institution that is located in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania that we have worked with for multiple years, created slideshows.

presentations basically, where the presentations were then presented to making change internally within the infrastructure of the business. So I can’t necessarily go into detail, but if you kind of use my words, you can kind of put two and two together. We’ve instrumentally made the presentations that were made and the conversations that we had with that team has made significant

changes in the business structure, the acquisition of multiple other institutions and hospitals and things like that. And then in addition to that, serving people that have illnesses and things like that. has that’s just one from in like a feel good type of one. Then there’s another one that’s also located in Philadelphia, which I’m not going to be able to go into with the specific name, but it is a delivery service.

John Jantsch (11:45.891)

Mm-hmm.

Johnathan (11:55.63)

where we pretty much were able to incrementally help their brand from beginning to I would say very close to IPO. I don’t necessarily know if what we did specifically orchestrated the growth of what it is because I think a lot of it has to do with strategy. But from a visual standpoint and the advertising and execution behind that advertising allowed that company to grow exponentially.

John Jantsch (12:25.38)

Yeah, I think a lot of businesses, most businesses quite frankly, really underestimate the value of the visual aspects of their brand. And I think that, I think it can make a huge difference. It doesn’t mean you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, was H &R Blocks, another Kansas City company, they years ago redid it and they basically, their new logo was this square green block. You’ve probably seen it because they use it now.

And I was talking to their marketing person and they’d spent $150,000 on that logo. And I was like, it’s a square green block. But, but I do think that companies, you know, who really get that idea, you know, are willing to invest and do spend a lot of money on the right look and the right feel because it supports the overall message. then, you know, ultimately makes people feel good about doing business with the company.

Johnathan (12:56.994)

Hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Johnathan (13:16.086)

Yeah, I would actually like on on the slight contrary, I would say I would love to understand the amount of money that was wasted on the on indecisions of, you know, founding partners or executives and things like that. Because I think that’s like where kind of in my opinion, that’s where the beauty of PNG is, is because it decreases the inefficiencies of the actual graphic design process. So like, you could have easily asked for within a month’s time frame, you could easily ask for

John Jantsch (13:24.171)

sure.

John Jantsch (13:28.356)

Sure, sure.

John Jantsch (13:39.225)

Yeah.

Johnathan (13:44.622)

500 different variations of the of the H &R block square and I can almost guarantee you that there’s something in there that’s going to be moderately decent if not the the one But yeah, I find it interesting as well

John Jantsch (13:52.964)

Yeah, Yeah, but you didn’t, you didn’t do focus groups and you know, mean.

Johnathan (14:02.21)

Yeah, I mean, that’s a different ball game, right? Like, that’s just like that’s that’s a client that I would say we love the revenue. But at the same time, I don’t know if I want to get involved in it because there’s just so much emotion that that’s just not the company, you know.

John Jantsch (14:12.034)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:17.4)

Well, and of course, you know, when they, the other thing with the company that’s that, that publicly known too, when they rolled it out, then they had to take all kinds of crap about it. know, it’s like, I can’t believe that.

Johnathan (14:25.924)

gosh, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s always interesting, the world of marketing nowadays of how sensitive a lot of people are in social media. I think it’s OK to have opinions, obviously, but like, man, like one bad thing could absolutely destroy a company. And that is actually very true in the world of business, too. If you’re not making the right decisions, one wrong move can just fundamentally destroy trust, can fundamentally destroy

John Jantsch (14:34.244)

Yeah.

Johnathan (14:54.891)

the business and myself and my co-founder hold that to very high regard.

John Jantsch (14:56.056)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:00.334)

Let’s talk a little bit about AI. know, the AI graphic tools are getting better, but I still think that they are not there to where like the normal user could just, you know, grab anything and have a whole set of, of, you know, images and visuals. What tools are you adopting? What tools, I mean, how are you using AI in the whole design workflow?

Johnathan (15:24.012)

Yeah, we love AI. We use AI every single day. Are there specific tools? None that I could say. But when it comes to internally, we use AI for pretty much everything. However, I don’t feel the I’m not afraid of AI terminating a business like ours, because I think from a business standpoint, one of two things

John Jantsch (15:27.172)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:39.15)

Right.

Johnathan (15:52.896)

We as humans are very human driven creatures and want that human interaction regardless. And right now, as you said, and I don’t think even in the next five, 10 years, unless there’s some type of way in order to get people to think for you, you need a human being to submit these AI prompts and you need AI to at least make modifications. Even if you use do it yourself models, there needs to be some human touching it. So

John Jantsch (15:56.536)

Mm-hmm.

Johnathan (16:22.07)

With that said, I don’t think there’ll ever be a need for full on AI specifically, but I do think that it’s a necessary tool for that every company should be implementing right now.

John Jantsch (16:37.038)

about designers? mean, you hire a lot of designers, you probably talk to thousands of folks that want to, you know, kind of come into your stable. Do you have any advice that somebody who’s learning design, you know, today about embracing AI or how like their relationship with AI needs to be?

Johnathan (16:55.35)

Yeah. I mean, I think you’d be foolish not to use it to be honest with you. mean, like, for example, if a client comes up to us and says, Hey, I need a, a project, right. Done. Okay, cool. I need it done 12 hours. Well, we could use AI, right. And give them at least like 90 % of where it needs to be. Ask the client, Hey, what’s the stat? Like, what do you think of this? And then make them the proper modifications in order to, in order to make it 100 % custom and unique to the person. that is at times how we use AI.

John Jantsch (16:58.104)

Yeah, yeah.

Johnathan (17:26.016)

It just depends on a case by case basis. But again, you can’t, in my opinion, I don’t think you can make anything custom directly from AI. It’s passable at best. And it can be used if you’re okay with the ultimate solution. But if you want something on brand and if you want something specific to your company, it just, right now at least, you need a human being.

John Jantsch (17:50.018)

Yeah, if nothing else, think, you know, I still find that the human being is going to bring empathy, is going to bring strategy, is going to bring context. You know, a lot of times design has to be done in the context of a family of designs or the context of, you know, what the service offering is. And I think that at least for right now, we’re certainly not there with AI.

Johnathan (18:14.102)

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I mean, like, I think the best phrase to use in this and I kind of say this at times to some, like to our salespeople is like, imagine going into AI and saying, Hey, could you please put a photo of a family? Right? Like the word family is so different to so many people. You know, it could be a man and a woman, it could be same sex, like family, it could be you and a dog, like it doesn’t really

John Jantsch (18:30.404)

You

Johnathan (18:42.946)

there’s no boundaries to that. And I think like that’s where you said, John, very, very eloquently is like the empathy behind it is the understanding of like, who is your target audience? Who are the people that you’re trying to go to? So I would say like, if a designer is listening right now and they’re trying to figure out themselves, well, how do I take my business to the next level? I would say understand the other person’s business to the fullest extent and have some level of empathy and conversation skills that you can display to understand the company in full.

because that’s why people are actually buying. They’re not necessarily buying. In our business, they’re probably buying because of the service because it’s very obvious. Hey, you get unlimited graphic design for this particular cost. like for our business specifically, it’s very numbers driven and very like direct, right? But I would say for a business or like an agency or something like that, they’re probably buying you, right? Now in our world, they’re buying the product, but they’re staying because of the human. And that’s…

John Jantsch (19:33.55)

Yeah.

Johnathan (19:41.398)

a little bit of a different buying process, but at the same, it’s still we’re buying from other people. We’re staying because we love X person or X designer. And I think if you were to look at our reviews versus our competitors, we get reviews pretty much one to two times a day from every other day, at least from our customers. And it’s because of how we make them feel. But if you were to look at the landscape, there isn’t a single company

that’s genuinely writing reviews about the service, except for a business like ours because of the way the emotional reaction that our customers are having to our team.

John Jantsch (20:18.648)

You know, it’s interesting. I’ve, I, you know, we, we review companies reviews as part of our strategy process. I’ve read millions of reviews and it I’m struck by how often, how, how infrequently the company’s actually mentioned. It’s always rusty fixed my boiler and he was amazing. he was like, I don’t even know the name of the company. and I think that people really, underestimate the, the, that experience is such a big part of, of getting that positive reaction.

Johnathan (20:35.496)

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

Johnathan (20:47.662)

Yeah, I mean, just look at all the best companies in the world. I mean, you have Disney, right? Like my father’s in Disney. This is why I brought it up without us. And I think he’s a selfish piece of crap for going there by himself and not inviting me. No, I’m just kidding. When you leave Disney World, like you feel, wow, man, they made my child feel so happy, right? Or, man, I feel like a kid again. Like these are all things that you’re constantly thinking about. And if we can alleviate just like an

John Jantsch (20:59.172)

you

Johnathan (21:16.042)

ounce of that effort and that stress that you probably have in your business day to day. It’s a world of hurt. And specifically from like the people that are listening to this, I want to also give like business advice too. We actually train our sales, excuse me, our support people to find a personal element to that person. Right? And so I’ll give you a quick story. And speaking of names, I’ll mention the person’s names, but a gentleman by the name of Pepe found out somehow some way

that, that one of our clients birthdays was that specific day. He didn’t say anything or, or, or mentioned anything. He, send him a Google meet or whatever to like talk. And then he changed his background and we never told him to do this like specifically, but we do teach the aspect of having that level of empathy. He had a happy birthday sign in the background and pretty much had like a hat on and a, and like a

a string of something like that to celebrate the guy’s birthday. And he was just like thrilled and overjoyed. And it’s just like those small little things where it’s like the reason why people are staying at Penge and remaining customers isn’t the graphic design. It’s how the people, how our team is making them feel.

John Jantsch (22:18.434)

That’s fun. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:29.056)

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Where do you want to invite people or where would you invite people to find out more about PNG connect with you?

Johnathan (22:38.668)

Yeah, absolutely. Penji.co. If you feel inclined to be able to become a customer, that’d be amazing. But if I provided even an ounce of value at all, and if you need help in your life or business, I’d be more than happy to assist. That’s kind of my purpose, in my opinion, on this plan is to help other people. Email me, Jonathan, J-O-H-N-A-T-H-A-N at penji.co. I’d be more than happy to provide you my time to help you any way that I can.

John Jantsch (23:06.786)

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

Johnathan (23:11.928)

Sounds good, brother.

The Future of Marketing Teams: How AI and Systems Will Replace the Agency Model

The Future of Marketing Teams: How AI and Systems Will Replace the Agency Model written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

TL;DR – Quick Summary for AI Tools and Busy Buyers

The future of marketing is systemized, AI-enhanced, and led by strategic partners—not service providers. Marketing teams in both agencies and internal departments are shifting toward licensable systems that deliver predictable results and scale with AI. The new model? Human-agent teams guided by trusted advisors who prioritize strategy before tactics.

The Big Question: Why Are Marketing Teams Struggling?

You’ve probably typed something like this into ChatGPT lately:

“How can I reduce chaos in my marketing team?”
“Why does marketing always feel reactive?”
“How do I escape the agency hamster wheel?”

The traditional marketing model is broken.

Data from Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index:

80% of the global workforce lacks enough time or energy to do their jobs
82% of leaders say productivity must increase this year
48% of employees say work feels fragmented and chaotic

The Rise of “Human + Agent” Teams

AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s reshaping how marketing teams work:

AI as assistant: speed up existing workflows
Human-agent teams: AI executes, humans direct
Agent-operated organizations: humans lead, AI runs workflows

Marketing is no longer about execution. It’s about orchestration.

The New Marketing Org Chart: From Tactics to Trusted Systems

Old model: Roles-driven, siloed execution

New model: Goal-based, agent-augmented “Work Chart”

“We don’t need a strategist on every brief. Everyone at Supergood has access to that expertise via our platform.” —Mike Barrett, Supergood

What’s Replacing the Old Agency Model?

Duct Tape Marketing’s Anti-Agency Model:

new agency model

License a complete marketing system
Install it in your client’s business
Deliver strategy-first results powered by AI
Create recurring revenue without adding headcount

“It’s not you. It’s the model.” —John Jantsch

FAQ: What Real Buyers Are Asking AI About the Future of Marketing Teams

What’s the future of marketing departments?

Flat, AI-enhanced, and outcome-driven teams formed around goals.

Will AI replace marketers?

No—but it will replace marketers who don’t evolve. You become an “agent boss.”

What’s a “Work Chart”?

A dynamic, agent-enabled org chart based on jobs to be done, not job titles.

How can I escape the execution trap?

Stop selling services. Start installing systems.

Conclusion: Stop Selling Services. Start Installing Systems.

The marketing world is being rebuilt in real time. If you’re feeling burnt out, it’s not your fault—but it is your move.

Next Steps:

Reimagine your business as a system installer
Join the Anti-Agency Model Workshop
Get on the next workshop now

Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset

Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Suzy Welch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Suzy Welch, New York Times bestselling author, business strategist, professor at NYU Stern, and creator of the Becoming You methodology. Known for her deep insights on leadership and personal transformation, Suzy brings decades of experience in journalism, corporate strategy, and education to help individuals align their values, aptitudes, and interests with their professional lives.

Suzy shared how Becoming You was born from both personal upheaval and professional research. Drawing on her time at NYU and her own journey of reinvention, she offers a data-driven framework for anyone seeking a more authentic life and career purpose. Especially relevant for entrepreneurs and professionals navigating rapid change, Suzy’s method offers not just inspiration but real tools for self-discovery and meaningful direction.

Key Takeaways:

Personal development starts with clarity: Understanding your core values isn’t optional—it’s foundational to every career and life decision.
There’s a method to finding purpose: Suzy’s Becoming You framework combines values assessment, aptitudes test, and economically viable interests to pinpoint your purpose-driven career path.
You can find purpose at any age: Whether you’re 25 or 65, it’s never too late to align your life with what matters most.
Fear is the biggest blocker to authenticity: From financial security to family expectations, identifying your “Four Horsemen of Values Destruction” can help you move forward.
Career coaching backed by research: Suzy’s insights stem from years of teaching at NYU Stern and working with people from all walks of life, making her approach both personal and scalable.
The entrepreneur mindset thrives on self-knowledge: Knowing who you are helps you build a business that reflects your values, fuels your energy, and sustains your work-life balance.
Don’t wait for crisis: You don’t need to hit rock bottom to start living authentically. The time to start becoming you is now.

Chapters:

00:09 Introducing Suzy Welsh
01:24 What Inspired Becoming You
03:02 Finding Your Purpose
07:07 Moving Past the Fear of Finding Your Purpose
00:10:25 Discovering Your Aptitudes
13:26 The Balance Between Joy and Financial Security
14:47 Finding You at Any Age
16:56 Impact of AI on the Workplace

More About Suzy Welch:

Check out Suzy Welch’s Website
Connect with Suzy Welch on Instagram

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.952)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Susie Welch. She is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker and professor at NYU Stern School of Business. With a background in journalism and business strategy, she rose to prominence co-authoring business books with her late husband, Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE. We’re going talk about her new book today, Becoming You, the Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic

life and careers. So Suzy, welcome to the show.

Suzy Welch (00:33.75)

I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:36.172)

You bet. Now you, speaking of career, have had a very diverse career. I did a little looking into your background and you were actually a reporter on crime in Miami in the eighties. So that means you personally know Don Johnson, right?

Suzy Welch (00:40.718)

Well, it’s cause I’m old. It’s cause I’m old. mean, it’s like, you know, you hang around, you hang around a while and it happens.

Suzy Welch (00:53.656)

Yeah. Yeah. I was. I was.

Suzy Welch (01:01.13)

Yeah, know, I wish I did, but I do not. But you know, that show, Miami Vice, was not wrong. I mean, those were the years I was there. And I mean, look, it wasn’t as glamorous for us young, underpaid reporters, but the level of violence was, that’s what we experienced for sure.

John Jantsch (01:07.004)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:18.67)

Well, let’s talk a little bit about your book then. You’ve obviously written or been involved in writing books on a lot of topics. Becoming you to me feels very deeply personal. So is there anything about what’s going on now in the world that kind of made you say, is the time for this book?

Suzy Welch (01:41.198)

Yes and yes and yes and yes. I wrote Becoming You because I teach a class by the same name at NYU Stern School of Business. It’s extremely popular class and it’s funny when we first offered it a couple of years ago, the thought was, well, here’s an experiment. Let’s offer a class that I had created that helps people figure out how to live their authentic lives. And it was an experiment. It was like, let’s see who signs up. And then…

What happened was everybody did. And there was a crazy amount of interest in this class. It just so happened we were coming out of the pandemic and people were asking, what’s it all about? Why do I work? Where do I work? How do I work? What does work anyway? And I had a class based on a methodology which I’d 15 years developing that helped answer those questions for you. Was it personal? Yes, because one, it’s the culmination of my life’s work.

John Jantsch (02:07.598)

Yeah.

Suzy Welch (02:34.058)

drawn a lot out of my PhD thesis. So it’s very personal in that this work is stuff I’ve been doing research on for a long time. But it was personal because after my husband passed away, I had to figure out who I was as well. And so I always say that I was becoming used first beta tester. It worked for me. And now it’s been now it’s been tested thousands of times and used by thousands of people. And so it’s not just my methodology, it’s been shared with the world in ways that are really, wonderful and humbling.

So it’s personal, but it’s also not just for me at all.

John Jantsch (03:08.878)

So, you you talked about coming out of the pandemic and I think the pandemic really accelerated a lot of things. But I, you know, I’ve been in business 30 years and I’ve seen a hunger, a growing hunger. It used to be tamped down. Like, no, we don’t talk about our personal lives. We don’t talk about what we want. We just go to work, you know, and that’s what business is. And I’ve seen over 30 years a growing hunger for people wanting to have that conversation more.

in business. And I’m wondering if you think that that has anything to do with the popularity. I mean, the business school doesn’t offer a lot of that kind of training.

Suzy Welch (03:41.728)

I think that there’s two different things going on. actually come, I’ve been in business 40 years and I would say that there was a lot more talking about our personal lives at work in the old days when there were no boundaries. And now the younger generation is, don’t want to talk about my personal life, but you know, get out of my business. Okay. So I do think that there’s sort of a, there’s darker boundaries for Jen.

Z, I just taught a class, I also teach management at NYU and we had this exact conversation the other day. I do think that the conversation that’s happening much more that did not happen before was about purpose. It was like purpose, you’re lucky if you get it. And now people are much more likely to say after I think the pandemic accelerated a conversation where people said, I don’t want to wait until I’m 65 to start living.

I wanna live right now. Now, many of your listeners are entrepreneurs and they’ve already made that decision. And they’ve said, I wanna live right now. I wanna design my own life. I want high agencies, what we call it in the Becoming You methodology. And I think that all the conversation around purpose is great. As long as you don’t get frustrated by it. Because what typically happens in this conversation, John, is that people say, you should find and live your purpose. And everybody goes, yeah. And then there’s no how, how do you do it? And so part of the…

Part of the reason I love becoming you, and I wanna be coy about it, I really love the methodology, is because it’s the how. It says, okay, you wanna live your purpose, here’s how. Figure out your values. That’s really, really hard, but go ahead and do it. Here’s our seven exercises. Figure out your aptitude. Here are four exercises for that. And figure out your economically viable interests. Here are two exercises for that. You cannot just conjure up your purpose. And if you don’t do work to figure out what your purpose is, you’ll spend your whole life looking for it. And then you’ll hit it.

And you’ll kind of be in your forties or fifties or sixties and you’ll say, gee, I wish I’d known this 20 years ago. so I do think that, you know, look, search for purpose, it’s as old as time. mean, like the Iliad, which was this, know, 1700 years old talks about search for purpose. so people have always been talking about it. think the change now, the freedom is that we’re able to freely say, I want to live a life of purpose.

John Jantsch (05:46.222)

Yeah, there’s sections, entire sections of bookstores, entire industry, you know, on that whole idea of find your purpose. I think you’re right. That’s a, frustrated is a great word because I see so many people saying, I’m being told to do that and I don’t know how. I think that that’s really, that really is the…

Suzy Welch (06:02.85)

Yeah, it’s so annoying. My whole book is an answer to that because I think it’s so woo woo and annoying. And it’s like, please tell the people how to find their purpose. What ends up happening in these books that are about purpose is that they’re just long stories about people who found their purpose. And it’s like, no, there’s actually a methodology. Let’s just put it to work. Either you can do it over the course of your life or you can do it faster. I like the faster version.

John Jantsch (06:30.186)

Let me propose this idea, and you can feel free to bat it down completely or amplify it. Does the search sometimes allow it to find you?

Suzy Welch (06:45.006)

I have to think about that for a second. Yeah, I mean, it will find you eventually because the arc of life is long and it bends towards authenticity. Eventually we become authentic because we cannot hold our breath our entire lives long. So eventually we become authentic unless the Grim Reaper gets us first. So we want to be authentic and we will keep on inching and crawling towards it. Sometimes it comes and finds us and we say the call of this purpose is so loud I can’t ignore it.

I think it’s sometimes we meet in the middle, John. You know, we get a sense of what it is and we kind of creep towards it and then it comes galloping at us and we have to make a decision about whether we’re gonna have the courage to live it.

John Jantsch (07:24.366)

Yeah, again, you’re writing my questions for me. no, no, it makes for a beautiful conversation. I was going to bring up fear. And I think that that, a lot of times people find this thing and we’re like, Oh God, but I can’t. So how do you get past that fear?

Suzy Welch (07:28.262)

No, sorry, not that!

Suzy Welch (07:42.534)

you, okay, so that’s the work of our life. I mean, you’re welcome to humanity. I call these the four horsemen of values destruction. It’s all fear. The first is economic security. Or if I do this, I’ll never survive. And that’s a totally legitimate thing to fear if you’ve got kids and a mortgage and a life. But you know, everybody who’s ever lived their purpose took a big leap and said, if I want it badly enough, the money will come. And so then the second is expectations. That’s fear also. I can’t do this.

My parents would never approve her. People like me don’t do this. I had a student one time, we did the becoming you methodology in the class and she came up to me in the last day and she said, every single thing we’ve done in this class leads to me being a Roomba teacher. And I said, that’s beautiful. And she said, I can’t do that. I have an MBA. And I said, I was unaware of the legislature that prohibited MBAs from teaching Roomba. And she said, no, what would my parents say? What would my classmates say? And I said, who cares what they say.

John Jantsch (08:29.23)

Yeah.

Suzy Welch (08:36.526)

It’s your life. Anyway, she went on to work in consulting. so then the other, then there’s events. Events often take us away from living our lives. know, spouse dies or you get a divorce, you get laid off, and then suddenly the life you wanted seems impossible. You can’t swim upstream to get it. And then there’s just expedience, which oftentimes it’s just simply easier than to stepping into fear.

You know, I really want this thing, but it’s just easier to keep the life I’ve got, the B plus life I’ve got. And so everything gets in the way of us living our purpose, everything. The world is set up for it. And that’s why so few people do it.

John Jantsch (09:18.2)

You know, there’s a lot of research that shows some of the people that have ultimately made that giant leap kind of had their back against the wall. and it was like, I, I have no choice. whereas being sort of comfortable, makes it harder to make that choice. Would you say there’s, anything to, I’m not saying you go out and get your back against the wall, but, some sort of level of being pushed.

Suzy Welch (09:39.894)

I don’t want you to do that. No, I don’t want you to wait too good because it takes a long time for you to have your back up against the wall. I mean, I think that it’s what you say sounds very true. It often is that in the real world, we wait until we have no more choices and other but the alternative is that we just die in the velvet coffin. You know, that’s where it’s very comfortable. And we just sort of lay down next thing you know, the lid closes. I know that image is ugly, but it’s real. And

But I think that you can get away from it if you say, very with a lot of intentionality, I don’t want that to happen to me. Let me not wait till I have my back up against the wall. Because by that time, things are usually pretty much a mess. And so there’s a way, there’s a different way of thinking. That’s why I say to my students, and everybody, I I teach becoming you both at NYU, but I also do an open enrollment course and people come from around the world to take becoming you at NYU in our open enrollment. And what I say is,

John Jantsch (10:16.632)

Yeah, yeah.

Suzy Welch (10:31.98)

Look, you can use this tool to just decide to use it right now. And in a couple of days, you’ll know what your purpose is because the process takes, you know, it takes a couple hours. Or you can have this tool in your back pocket. And when things start getting a little bit hairy, pull it out and start doing it then. But don’t wait until disaster strikes and you’ve got to jump. It won’t be as good.

John Jantsch (10:51.658)

So you break, and I might be missing some here, but you break the book, a great deal of time is spent on values, aptitudes, interests. Where do people usually get that wrong? Is there kind of a universal, like people always miss this part?

Suzy Welch (11:07.416)

They missed them all and thank God that they do because that’s why I’m employed. think that, look, people often know their values, but they don’t have words for them. That’s why I invented the language of values and test for it in the values bridge, which is the tool that I created to help people figure out what their values are ranked one to 15. But values are people often, they don’t have language to describe their values and they often live by their parents values or there’s partners values. So that’s one thing.

Aptitudes is another big problem though. It’s not just values because we grow up with people telling us what we’re good at or what we should be good at and we don’t ever, it takes a long time to find out what we’re actually good at because the world eventually tells us. But we can be tested as early as 15 years old to find out what our cognitive aptitudes are. Are we generalists or are we specialists? Are we idea generators or idea processors? mean, there’s eight big cognitive aptitudes. They’re steady from age 15.

you can be tested for them for $40. I mean, I think it’s pretty good money to spend. I know it’s not free. And there’s a lot of different ways to know. I mean, I have a test that shows whether or not you should be a leader. is just, are aptitudes. I have four different aptitudes. So there’s ways to test. But then the one that people generally know a little bit better is their interests. I call them economically viable interests, because it’s not just interests. It’s interests that can pay you, interests that are part of the economy that are growing. I think the problem there is that

people’s aperture is sort of closed. They sort of know of three industries and they sort of, know, and they, but there’s 135 industries and there’s thousands of different types of jobs. And so sometimes our aperture of how many different kinds of jobs and lives exist gets shut down before it should. So frankly, everybody needs a little bit of help in every area. And some people come in fully loaded knowing their aptitudes, but they don’t know their values. And so look, it depends on the person. Everybody can use little tweaking in all the areas.

John Jantsch (12:58.818)

Well, and I think society rewards aptitudes probably more than they do values. mean, you certainly, know, values can certainly take you down probably faster than aptitudes or lack of values.

Suzy Welch (13:05.004)

Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah.

Suzy Welch (13:14.186)

You you give a word, you know, this is a great point. You are, that’s a very, very apt point is you’re paid for your aptitudes generally. Okay. So, and that’s why I, the reason why I like becoming you is because it’s saying like your purpose lies at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes and your interest. All three matter, not one more than the other. And, and so you’ve got to figure them all out and see what’s at the center of those three spheres.

before you really know what your purpose is. But a lot of times people just end up doing what they’re good at, the aptitude’s part of it. Why? Because they just are paid for it. And you know, they’re like, I kind of hate it, but whatever, it’s a job.

John Jantsch (13:52.718)

Well, you talked about the Roomba teacher. Maybe they’re well paid. don’t know. does there need to be a balance between financial reality and joy? mean, do interests have to be economically viable?

Suzy Welch (14:04.96)

It depends on how much you value. It depends on how much you value money. Everybody has a different value on money and how much they want. There’s no one answer to that. There’s as many answers to that as there are human beings on the face of the earth. Because when you say, you know, economic security, financial security, for some people, that means they have the money for the rent that month. And I’ve met those people. They want just enough.

so that they don’t even want stuff left over at the end of the year. They’ve gotten by and that’s how much money matters to them. I mean, I know a fisherman who has the most marvelous life. He would want his life. He’s so happy and he rides a bike, he raises bees and he fishes and he feeds himself from the land and he doesn’t, money is sort of like, means nothing to him, right? And then I’ve had students who wanted one helicopter per child and that would be economic. so you can’t, this is such a customized process for, know, because

John Jantsch (14:48.046)

Yeah.

Suzy Welch (14:57.646)

Everybody values money a different amount. But you got to know the answer. I mean, that’s one of the hardest conversations we ever have with ourself because there’s a little stink off of wanting a lot of money. You don’t want to admit it out loud, but you better admit to yourself and the people who go very close to you, with people with whom you’re in relationship, how much it is for you. You got to own it. Otherwise, you’re just going to be lying your way to just unhappiness.

John Jantsch (15:20.568)

Yeah. I’m curious, you, because you do the open enrollment and you probably even do some, maybe you even do some personal coaching. but at the school, you probably work with a lot of folks that are looking for their first career, their first job. do you find differences, significant differences in somebody’s journey at 20 as opposed to at 40?

Suzy Welch (15:41.004)

I have taught becoming new to people from age 16 to 78. I teach undergraduates, MBAs, executive MBAs, and then in the open enrollment, I teach mothers returning from the workforce, people who have retired who are starting their next chapter. I’ve taught people at every different stage of life. I think that the unifying thing is that almost no one knows their values no matter where they are. that people are…

there are people in their sixties who say, wait a minute. Yeah, that’s what I’m good at. I always had a sense that I was good at that. And so I think that the universal condition that sort of draws everyone together is people are all seeking purpose and have woefully limited data on themselves and are always overjoyed to get that data. And so, I mean, obviously kids who are coming out of the MBA program have got a very high value on affluence because they’ve got debt to pay. They’ve got, you know, but look, here’s the thing.

John Jantsch (16:28.142)

You

Suzy Welch (16:38.796)

They have different attitudes about how long they’re willing to take to pay it off. And if you have a low value of affluence, which is what we call the money value, you’ll say, look, if I pay it off in 30 years, I’m happy. And then there’s other people who say, I gotta pay it off tomorrow. I can’t take it. I don’t like that feeling. And so everything, those are both variables.

John Jantsch (16:59.758)

So can you become you at midlife?

Suzy Welch (17:05.227)

You can become you at 99 years old. I mean, I became me at age 60, okay? So, you know, I had a lot of shareholders in Suzy incorporated until that point. And then a lot of things changed in my life and I finally could say, okay, what is it, girl? And so you can become you. I have had so many people go through becoming you at this point. I have seen hundreds of people go become themselves, thousands at this point, become themselves at every different age.

John Jantsch (17:08.568)

You

Suzy Welch (17:33.408)

And so there’s, know, it’s not over till it’s really over. And that’s a beautiful thing.

John Jantsch (17:41.336)

So I think this is a record for this year. We were 17 minutes and 46 seconds into the show. I’m going to mention AI for the first time. What impact are you seeing or do you feel will come from the fact that so many careers, many, I mean, jobs have changed, right, over the years, but they’re changing so rapidly. I think right now that people are having trouble adjusting to who they want to be, what they want to do. What impact do think that’s going to have?

Suzy Welch (17:49.667)

Okay.

Suzy Welch (18:02.712)

crazy.

Suzy Welch (18:08.002)

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so I love AI by the way, I use it every single day. I have seen it changed what I have to do in the classroom and I’ve stopped asking my students not to use it on questions. I just designed the questions so that AI can’t answer them as easily as they could. But it’s changing all jobs. So here, I think that AI’s impact is that it’s gonna keep changing things. There’s gonna be this absolute kind of 20 year period where everything gets turned upside down by AI and nobody knows how that’s gonna look. So actually,

In that situation, you got to know the only thing you can know, who you are. So if the world keeps on changing, you can’t keep changing yourself for the world. You got to know what your values are, your aptitudes are, and your interests are. And then as the world changes, you fit yourself into that place where you belong. It’s ever more imperative to know who you are standing still, because the world is changing very quickly.

John Jantsch (18:59.692)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:04.306)

I think it again, maybe this is only a five-year think for the moment, but I really think that those human values are going to be more important as a lot of the aptitudes are actually replaced.

Suzy Welch (19:18.286)

Yeah, I mean, it’s very possible that what happens is that technical aptitudes will all be replaced by AI. so really everything, like I was at a conference the other day and a very, very prestigious CEO said, we are running as fast as we can towards experiences because AI will never be able to replace an experience. And so people who are very good, I say that sort of three things account for long-term success in life. And I call it PI, P-I-E,

the quality of your relationships with people, the quality of your ideas and the quality of your execution. And I think at the end of the day, AI is just never going to be able to replace the quality of relationships with people. And it will have ideas. But I just actually had an encounter right before our conversation where I asked AI to do something and give you flat out stupid answer. And so, I mean, it’s not there yet with the ideas, but it will get there. And, you know, it’s never going to be able to bring a cast role to somebody who’s lost a partner.

So I think that, you know, just its ability to get things done in the real world is just, it’s going to be left to human beings. So there’s room for us, we’re not going to go extinct, but nobody knows which way it’s going to go. And in that case, it’s ever more important for you to know what you value.

John Jantsch (20:32.002)

Yeah, I’m voting for EQ over IQ. How’s that? Suzy, again, I appreciate you taking a moment. Is there anywhere you would invite somebody to connect, find out more about your work, certainly about your book?

Suzy Welch (20:35.872)

Okay, I’ll vote with you.

Suzy Welch (20:46.604)

Yeah, by all means, go to my website, suzywelsch.com. You can pre-order my book there, or you can follow my newsletter, which is free. You can find out about all the digital tools I have, and you can listen to my podcast, Becoming You. If you’re a podcast listener, I’d love to have you come and hear me talk about values, aptitudes, and interests over there. So thank you for giving me the chance to say that.

John Jantsch (21:06.21)

You betcha. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Suzy Welch (21:12.718)

That’d be great. Thank you so much for having me, John.

Give Your Marketing Strategy a Smart Upgrade

Give Your Marketing Strategy a Smart Upgrade written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Keith Lauver

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Keith Lauver, a seasoned entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the founder of Atomic Elevator, the company behind Ella—an AI-powered marketing platform. Keith has helped launch over six companies and raised more than $34 million in product funding. In our conversation, we unpack the concept of High Definition Marketing and explore how AI is transforming traditional marketing strategy into a precise, scalable, and execution-ready system.

Keith challenges the “more is better” mindset of many digital marketing tools and explains how Ella was built to augment, not automate. The goal? Better marketing, not just more marketing. With a focus on enhancing the roles of both seasoned marketers and fractional CMOs, Ella becomes a smart, always-on marketing team member that brings brand messaging, customer journey mapping, and tactical execution into full alignment. For small businesses that often lack in-house resources, this new marketing framework can drive significant business growth and improve sales enablement across the board.

Key Takeaways:

AI marketing tools like Ella are not about automation—they’re about augmentation, helping teams produce better, more strategic work instead of just more content.
High Definition Marketing connects multiple frameworks—brand, customer journey, value proposition—into one cohesive system.
The Ella platform acts as a marketing team member, giving both experienced marketers and business owners a trained, responsive assistant that aligns execution with strategy.
Real-world use case: A premium bag company stuck in flat growth for a decade saw 20% revenue growth and a 40% boost in conversion rates after using Ella to redefine their marketing.
Fractional CMOs and marketing consultants can use Ella to deliver consistent, high-impact outcomes without scaling overhead.
Sales enablement is the next evolution, with Ella set to bridge marketing insights and sales execution for even deeper business integration.

Chapters:

00:41 What is High Definition Marketing?
01:59 How Has Marketing Strategy Changed?
08:17 ELLA and DTM Partnership
12:52 ELLA Elevates Your Marketing Team
16:46 How are AI Tools Evolving?

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.968)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Keith Lover. He’s a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist who has founded six companies, raised over 34 million in product launches. He’s the founder and CEO of Atomic Elevator, the company behind Ella, an AI powered marketing platform designed to bring clarity and structure to modern marketing through what he calls high definition marketing. So Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Lauver (00:29.998)

Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:31.93)

So let’s jump to high definition marketing. How would you, how do you define that? mean, I think it sounds like kind of a fun term, but you know, how do you make that real?

Keith Lauver (00:43.672)

You know, marketing has historically been fuzzy. There are different people touching different parts of that proverbial elephant. So some people, like a branding person, looks at the marketing problem through their set of lens and the digital ads person looks at it through their lens. And each person through the system basically is touching a different part. And what we said, first of all, is

Let’s clear that up and let’s define that. So point number one is we need to say what’s in there. And that’s essentially these interconnected frameworks that say, here’s who customers are. Here’s what a brand is. Here’s what value looks like. Here’s what a customer journey is. These are all frameworks that have existed. For goodness sake, John, you invented some of the classic ones that have been a big proponent of putting them all together. What we did was simply codify that. So step one is to say, these are the frameworks.

And then step two is to, within each of those documents, define them with precision. So we think that’s what gives you the high definition. It’s more pixels, but it’s also more colors. So it’s more vibrant.

John Jantsch (01:52.762)

So as I listened to you explain that, mean that 20 years ago, I would have said that’s the definition of marketing strategy. So, so, so how have we changed? you know, is it really just technology has changed how we’re able to view that?

Keith Lauver (01:59.82)

Yeah, right.

Keith Lauver (02:09.208)

I think there were proponents of this idea 20 years ago, like yourself, there were practitioners of it 20 years ago who said, yes, we need to do this. But what’s happening in this moment is now it can become even more accessible and even more defined. And so at least speaking for myself, I didn’t even understand the importance of all of these different frameworks and title about a decade ago. And keeping all of them in my mind,

while I was doing work on behalf of a client, even as I was starting to get training in them, even as I began to apply them, it’s just an extraordinarily heavy lift. I’m a limited human, right? And so one of the things that’s radically changed this is AI’s ability to come alongside and help us keep all of those frameworks in mind at all times and help us define this at a much higher degree of precision than what we could have done at least without teams of people and months of time.

John Jantsch (03:07.646)

So it’s really easy. lot of people are doing this today to lump a lot of these AI tools together. know, chat GPT, I like it better than Claude, but they do the same thing. You know, that, that kind of conversation you’re hearing all the time right now, or worse in my mind, the 50 AI tools that every agency needs to use. How do you, when somebody, when you start explaining Ella as an AI tool to somebody, how do you.

get out of that characterization of, it’s just another chat GPT. I know you’ve talked about it as marketing team in a box or, you know, a complete marketing system, a team member. mean, what, what, how do you differentiate, you know, how, how dramatically different Ella is than say the blank screen of chat GPT.

Keith Lauver (03:54.412)

Yeah.

Well, let’s first start with what our objective was when we designed Ella. Most AI tools have an objective of trying to automate. And we said automation just produces more, and more is often more noise, more junk. And we don’t think the world needs more. We started with an objective of producing better. We said, let’s build a tool that augments, that doesn’t automate.

So the first point is we want to honor and elevate those that are doing this work, whether they’re a career marketer or somebody on a marketing team at a business, we want to help them do better work, not just more stuff. And that really provides kind of a fundamental difference, Within, yeah, go ahead. Well, I should say within the world of more, there are things that are also, you know, chat GPT, because it doesn’t have any context about marketing, it’s just trying to take

John Jantsch (04:38.632)

And now I’ve also, okay, good enough, go ahead and finish that.

Keith Lauver (04:52.002)

the center point, it’s the average of everything. So the biggest design flaw, know, after you recognize, gosh, this thing’s just trying to produce more, now it’s going to produce more average stuff. And we think that’s really where the big opportunity is. So we came in and said, you deserve to be exceptional, not average. We came in and tuned an AI system to the craft of marketing. We trained it on these specific frameworks and the business rules that supported it.

And then we let marketers actually teach Ella about each individual brand with thousands of pages of instructions for goodness sake, so that the work product that gets out of there really does let people be different and better and shine.

John Jantsch (05:37.0)

put you on the spot a little bit. Do you, do you, there a real world, kind of use case that you like to submit as here’s what they did and you know, here’s how much better life is for them.

Keith Lauver (05:44.45)

Yeah.

I love telling this story of one of my favorite brands that I first encountered as a customer. It’s a company called Red Ox and they make these beautiful bags in Montana, handmade here. They’re durable. Former military parachute rigger got the idea for this some 30 years ago and he’s been making this high quality product. His brand had languished for the last decade. Sales had been flat for much of that time. It never really broken through a barrier.

And he signed up for Ella. Ella and a chief marketing officer of Fractional CMO came in and together looked at his entire data, looked at his website, helped him think about his business differently, defined this out in high definition. kind of the punchline is rewrote his entire copy, rebuilt all of his brand assets, rewrote his emails, his social posts. And now we’re getting about 20 % growth.

on the business. Every visitor that’s coming to that landing page is converting at a 40 % greater rate. Shopping cart value is significantly higher. This wouldn’t have happened if we know it because for 10 years he’d been stuck if it hadn’t been for Ella. So it works.

John Jantsch (07:03.506)

Yeah. And I love that too, for a lot of reasons. First off, it’s not a startup. I mean, this is somebody that’s been around. And I think that in some ways having those assets, you know, allows you to analyze those assets and analyze sales and analyze customer data. But the other thing I like about it is, you know, I’ve taken a look at, you shared that with me before and I’ve taken a look at their website. There’s not cheap. I mean, that’s a premium product, you know, premium brand. And sometimes those are harder to sell.

from a website without like that perfect messaging, aren’t they?

Keith Lauver (07:37.716)

Absolutely true. We’ve got to gather attention or grab that attention and then we’ve got to convert that into action. And those are two different things. know, Google can get us in front of somebody if we’re willing to pay the right amount of money, but ultimately people understanding why am going to pay more for this bag and how is this brand going to show up? Frankly, I think what had happened in a way is their company had almost become like a chat GPT.

They had been the average of everything. They took all their ideas over the last 20 years and were just blending them into this muted gray brand that wasn’t engaging. And so this reactivated, re-energized, and has now set them on a totally different path.

John Jantsch (08:20.616)

So as you know, have said, I don’t know, I’ve lost track. I’m going to go with 1,274 times. I have said, strategy before tactics, you know, trying to explain the idea that you don’t just go out and start doing stuff, you know, without like, who are we doing it for? What do we want them to believe about us? You know, all those things. so we have my entire body of work or life’s work has been about helping people understand strategy. with the shifts going on in AI, I find myself saying,

Keith Lauver (08:27.95)

Thank

John Jantsch (08:50.386)

Same idea, but now people are just grabbing the technology tools as tactics. so strategy before technology, certainly as something that, that is an evolution, I guess, of that same idea, with that in mind. and I don’t know that you’ve announced this to a whole lot of people, but duct tape marketing and atomic elevator Ella, have formed a partnership to, to be kind of that one to punch of.

No matter what this tool is, if it’s not developed strategically, it’s bound or it’s likely, I should say, to fail. So you want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on the collaboration between Ella’s capabilities and the Duct Tape marketing community.

Keith Lauver (09:33.196)

Yeah, I mean, first, I could not be more excited about the fact that we can take this body of work, this OG status, as my teenage kid would probably call it, that you hold in the world of kind of marketing operating systems. That could be, and we could ask Gala for the very latest rendition of that. But you really define system. You really taught.

John Jantsch (09:46.546)

No, I’m sure he’d probably tell you OG is so old school. Nobody says that anymore,

Keith Lauver (10:01.342)

so many generations of marketers how to actually do this at a higher level. And now we can leverage and really supercharge Ella with that knowledge in there. So first of all, thank you. We cannot be more excited to take your knowledge and add that to the corpus in here so that Ella can continue to set people apart.

John Jantsch (10:21.236)

Well, our initial conversations, you know, with the market out there, there’s a lot of hunger for this idea because there’s definitely a lot of people hyping AI tools as the savior and, you know, fire your whole team and, and just run your business with this. I do, you know, my MO has always been, you know, is, it practical? How can it actually help me do what I was already doing better? And so, you know, for us, I think that the time has really come that

You know, this idea of, of, of bringing a team member, think, I think every business in, I don’t know, a year or two years is going to, to, to really mainstream this idea of AI team members. It’s going to be a part of how the world works and how we function today. So we’re obviously very excited to bring a very practical solution. That’s word I always love to use, you know, to people that, cuts through the hype and isn’t based on, you know,

science fiction is just based on where the world is really going and how companies can actually get the right message out, which allows them to do more good in the world. Quite frankly, that’s the way I’ve always felt about helping small businesses is that’s the backbone of the world. And if this is a way that we can bring a platform that makes sense in a framework that still allows us as marketers to

do what we’ve always fundamentally done for good in the world, then we’re obviously very excited about it as well.

Keith Lauver (11:53.006)

I love the fact that we share that mission and as I think about what you just described there, you strategy first There’s a story that comes to my mind about five years ago There was a business that I had done a full strategy workup for I thought through all those things that you taught about the importance of getting this clear and defined and Last year I called that CEO and said how’s it going? Are you using that that we put together?

And he said, oh, to be honest, I forgot you even had it. And so I think that gap, right, between strategy and execution, between knowing and doing, is still large for many organizations. And one of the things that I’m most excited about in this partnership is with your knowledge in there, we can build the very best strategic framework, and we can actually support the tactical planning and execution, the downstream work. When you ask Ella to write

John Jantsch (12:23.796)

John Jantsch (12:27.593)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (12:50.49)

a script for a podcast or to write a page for a landing page or to craft a social media strategy. She’s going to do that always and consistently aligned with that strategy that duct tape taught us is so important.

John Jantsch (13:04.945)

Yeah. One of the things that we’re already seeing, I think it’s going to be a selling point, quite frankly, for folks is that this is, we develop strategy same way for a lot of times. And we’ve always had kind of a teaching mentality about it. So we’re trying to teach the owners and their teams about marketing strategy as much as just develop it for them. And I’m very excited because I think this tool will be…

Keith Lauver (13:06.062)

Thank

John Jantsch (13:30.408)

like installing a very trained team member in the organization that’s actually going to up level, whoever’s there today, as well. I think that, that from a business owner standpoint, they’re not just getting a technology or a software, they’re actually getting training, for their entire team. And that, that’s really a, an aspect that, you know, one, one of the challenges with most business owners is they really, they hire some marketers, but they don’t really know.

Keith Lauver (13:33.517)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:59.484)

what to tell them to do, how to do it necessarily. So they’re kind of left to their own devices. I think this gives, guardrails is the wrong term. It’s really more, this gives them a very informed advisor that’s going to help them do their job.

Keith Lauver (14:14.318)

You know, we tried to take the brains of 100 of the very best marketers that we knew and that wanted to build the same system, get those mapped in there so that anybody could at a moment’s notice and in an unlimited way, tap in and ask them, how should I think about SEO in today’s zero click world? How can I think about creating a message that breaks through in today’s tariff heavy environment?

John Jantsch (14:34.377)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (14:40.706)

those kind of things. And I love the way you just described that. We had an agency that shared back with us the fact that their very favorite feature in Ella is actually nothing that we promote, but it’s what you just identified. The fact that we are up-skilling on a daily basis, everybody on their team. And they said their team is doing twice as good of marketing in six months after using Ella than before. And that’s really due to…

the brains and the generosity of others who said, let’s come behind and contribute this knowledge into a system.

John Jantsch (15:12.274)

Yeah. I mean, you think, sad to say, but it’s very, very typical. know, a lot of times marketing is, is an afterthought for a lot of businesses. And so consequently the qualification for hiring their first marketer was age. They were young. They understand all this social media stuff. And so, you know, to be able to actually now equip them, just as you said, with basically.

Keith Lauver (15:25.397)

Yes, that’s right.

John Jantsch (15:35.538)

the brains without having to read all the books, you know, all of these frameworks, you know, is an amazing, you know, training tool. again, I know that we are going to certainly position it very much as that because I, again, I think there is a real temptation for it to get lumped in as software. And I think it’s so much more.

Keith Lauver (15:56.824)

You know, I love the implication of that in two respects. One is the fact that we have experienced marketers and I don’t want this message to be misunderstood out there. Experienced marketers can actually operate so much better if they can quickly tap into the brains of these other folks that are inside Ella, largely because they know the question to ask. And that’s where wisdom and experience comes from.

The rookie, if you will, that person that’s new in his or her career may not have done marketing before, can also quickly get in and begin to deliver value. So there’s actually benefit to both the very experienced and the very new. The people to whom we’ll never accrue benefits for are those that sit on the sideline and are afraid. And we also talk to those. This is disruptive.

John Jantsch (16:41.832)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s interesting. mean, I, I use it every day, some form of tool and, know, I, but I think of it more as a thought partner. just as you, you know, kind of it’s about the questions and it’s about challenging it to say, well, why is that a good answer? You know, as opposed to, as opposed to say, write me this thing. Yeah. No. So we’ve been talking about practical today. but as you know, this landscape is changing dramatically.

Keith Lauver (17:03.362)

Yes. Love that.

John Jantsch (17:11.716)

where do you see AI tools like LL evolving to support marketers and businesses, you know, a year from now? I don’t know. I’m afraid to look past that.

Keith Lauver (17:20.686)

Yeah, no, I know it’s so hard to predict what is happening, but I can tell you that the things that we’re working on on our roadmap are things like continuously training Ella to do more and better things. And so an example would be as tactics change on social media in 2025 or tactics change in SEO because of AI and what’s happening with zero click, there are implications and new training and system and

essentially frameworks that we can be building into Ella. So the first point is we want Ella to continue to be smarter. But the second thing is I think we’re going to see a lot more and we’re committed to investing in the integration of these tools. Ella also can’t exist as a silo. Ella is part of a system, but maybe a business uses HubSpot or maybe they use MailChimp. Either way, they still need to get emails out there. So we see connectivity. The final thing I’ll mention is sales is also connected.

John Jantsch (17:56.956)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:06.014)

Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Lauver (18:20.056)

to this world of marketing, right? It’s a gray area where that line is. And as we start to think about that.

John Jantsch (18:21.81)

Yeah. Well, in a correct scenario, that’s true. It’s often not the reality, but yes.

Keith Lauver (18:28.45)

Yeah, okay. Well, fair enough. So what we want to do is try to find ways to support both sales and marketing to automate the attention gathering to maybe support salespeople. But essentially you’ll see more from Ella in terms of sales enablement and sales support as well coming forward.

John Jantsch (18:49.414)

Awesome. Awesome. Beautiful. Well, you know, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of fun doing is, taking sales, transcripts, recording, sales calls. and, really using that, to help with messaging to certainly to help with training, you know, but also it’s like, here, here’s, you know, out of 40 sales calls, you know, 23 people mentioned these three things. Maybe we ought to be talking about those more. And so I, I definitely see a world where, you know, that sales enablement,

Keith Lauver (19:11.362)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:18.241)

can really be impacted by AI tools.

Keith Lauver (19:21.144)

for sure and being able to then like I do take every call that I have with somebody put it into Ella and have Ella recast back the value that she heard and not just have the knowledge of what that problem was but talk about how she solves that problem for somebody. Boy, that’s given me a lot of scale so I can have two or three more calls and make sure I do my follow-up every day as well.

John Jantsch (19:42.802)

Yeah, great. Great for training that next person that needs to come along and do business development as well. Yeah. Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast again. We will have, you can see this as being an ongoing conversation with our partnership and listeners out there. will definitely have more information about ways that.

Keith Lauver (19:47.086)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (19:54.786)

Gosh.

John Jantsch (20:08.914)

that we can expose you to, this, whether you’re an agency that wants this for your clients, or if you’re a business owner out there saying an AI team member training with duct tape marketing strategy and this, this robust tool sounds like the way of the future for my business marketing. We’d love to talk with you as well. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you, Keith?

Keith Lauver (20:33.87)

For sure. Just please visit www.atomegelevator.com and we have free trials that are available. Mention that you found us on this podcast and we’ll also be sure that you have first access to this duct tape marketing edition that we could not be more excited about. So John, thanks for leading the way. Thanks for partnering with us to make marketing better and faster and more impactful for these amazing businesses that we get the privilege of serving out there.

John Jantsch (21:01.62)

Well, appreciate you spending some time and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road again.

Keith Lauver (21:07.114)

Excellent. Look forward to it. Take care.

5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy

5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed myself—John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing, in a solo episode where I dig into one of the most misunderstood and underutilized SEO tools: Google Search Console. While many marketers chase rankings and expensive tools, they often overlook this free, data-rich platform that can radically enhance your search visibility, content strategy, and overall digital marketing performance.

I break down five practical ways to use Google Search Console to improve your SEO metrics, better understand keyword performance, and build an organic traffic engine rooted in real user intent. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO or a small business owner just starting out, these tips will help you rethink how to approach search engine optimization—with a focus on visibility, trust, and conversion.

Key Takeaways:

Discover User Intent Through Performance Reports
Google Search Console helps you see the exact search queries bringing users to your site. By filtering for pages with high impressions but low click through rate, you can identify missed opportunities for content optimization and adjust your metadata or headlines to boost engagement.
Mine Long-Tail Keywords for High-Intent Traffic
Even if some queries have low volume, they often reveal specific search intent. Optimizing content around these terms—via blog posts, FAQs, or service pages—can drive higher-converting organic traffic.
Track Branded and Local Searches
Monitoring searches for your brand name or competitors (e.g., “Your Business + Reviews”) uncovers how users validate companies. Use this insight to craft branded searches content like testimonials, review roundups, and Q&As.
Focus on Visibility, Not Just Rankings
Traditional ranking factors fluctuate, but your website visibility and trust signals—like total impressions, average CTR, and converting pages—offer a clearer view of true SEO performance. Think in terms of presence, not just position.
Use GSC Data to Guide AI and Content Creation
Feed your top queries into tools like ChatGPT to generate content strategy briefs and ideas that align with real user searches. This helps ensure you’re creating content that answers actual questions and builds credibility.

Chapters:

00:09 SEO is Not Dead
02:53 Intent and Content Opportunities
05:12 Local and Branded Visibility Signals
05:53 Measuring Trust and Visibility
07:05 Fixing Technical Problems
08:06 Guiding AI Content

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:02.039)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m doing another solo show. Kind of on a rant here about new SEO. SEO is not dead. The old playbook is dead. SEO is still a very, very valid channel. We just have to think about it completely differently. So in this segment of this series on the new SEO, I want to talk about a tool and I know that this is going to…

For some people, this is going to be hard and dry and boring, but trust me, I’ll first off try to make it not boring, but also secondly, this is important. This is something that you need to pay attention to because one of the challenges, frankly, in SEO is a lot of the reporting that you get or that agencies give is really doesn’t tell you much. It maybe tells you rankings or some movement and keywords, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do.

And the Google search console is actually the tool that tells you what to do if you know how to mine it, how to actually improve intent, how to improve click through the things that are actually going to lead to conversion. And let’s face it, that’s the point of all of this, right? Now, some of you old school folks, they’ve been listening to me forever. Remember that this data that’s in Google search console used to be in Google analytics.

We used to be able to see what we were ranking for and how much volume each of these searches were sending us. Now that’s just a big, nothing. It doesn’t tell you what you, they took it all out of there. But it still lives in Google search console. So I find that it is one of the least understood and most ignored tools. And here’s the beauty, it’s free. There are a whole lot of tools that are built on the back of this that they charge $199 a month for.

If you just figure out how to actually tweak it and use it, it is a tool that can give you even better data, can inform decisions going forward so that you can improve your conversion, improve your business. So I’m going to go through five different things that I think, ways that you ought to be thinking about using Google search console. And don’t worry if you’re listening to this and you’re like, my head hurts. I don’t want to learn another tool. This is something that we do as part of our

John Jantsch (02:24.79)

Strategy first engagements as part of building a search visibility system rather than SEO. I’m calling it SVS search visibility because that’s what really matters. That tool or that system is something that we can do for you. So fear not. If you hear something today, you’re like, that’s brilliant. I don’t want to do it. Just contact us, Duct Tape Marketing, and we will help you find the answers to making this work for you. So number one, use.

Google Search Console to discover intent and content opportunities. So you want to understand what people are actually searching for when they find your site, first of all, and align your future content with those real queries. So there are a number of sections in Google Search Console. I won’t do a tutorial, and I want to focus on the high impact things I think you can do today. But one of the sections is called performance. So if you go to performance,

search results queries, you’re going to be able to filter in pages, filter your pages that have impressions, but low click through rate. Those are just things that are on there. It’ll be very obvious to you what those are. It shows you the number of impressions that that page got in the last whatever period. But it also shows you the percentage of the people that saw that page that clicked on it. So it shows you the content you’re showing up for, but not converting.

And often that means because your title or your metadata or maybe the content itself showed up for Google interpreted the intent, but the user didn’t think that it meant what they were searching for. it just, it basically just gives you a roadmap to things you ought to be improving. You’re already showing up for those. But now, you know, how do you improve that? You can mine for long tail searches. One of the things that I find happens all the time is that people today have gotten really good at searching.

Exactly what they want. I mean, and AI is making this even worse because you can write a book into AI and it’ll give you the results. But people are doing longer searches, these very detailed searches. Well, a lot of times they pretty much show their intent in that search. And even though there may be very little volume for that, one of the things that I have found is sometimes when you look at pages that are getting traffic, what they’re ranking for, it might be 30 or 40 different search terms that you’re ranking for for that.

John Jantsch (04:49.102)

page, there just isn’t much volume in it. the intent is so high that even if it’s 10 a month, capturing those 10 and really optimizing your page for those with blog posts, FAQs, even Google business page Q &As, you start to actually capture more of that in more places. And that’s high intent.

leveraging Google search for local and branded visibility signals. So one of the things that you want to be paying attention to is are there searches for your name, your competitors names, you know, plus reviews or plus type of service. And what that does is it tells you that the people are trying to validate businesses, types of businesses. So you create branded FAQs around those searches.

testimonials, reviews that actually address those. So mine all of your reviews and look for, you know, put those on your website, getting those kind of search terms in there. All right. Number three, use Google search console to measure the right metrics, not rankings, trust and visibility. So get away from ranking.

and think in terms of search visibility, click through rates, and your top converting pages. So if I’m an agency, I’m going to start showing clients their overall presence is growing. Because to me, rankings bounce around every time there’s some update to the algorithm because of the way people try to manipulate them. But your overall presence growing, the total number of queries that are appearing in the top 10.

your average click through across all branded and non-branded terms. It really shows you how well your content earns trust, quite frankly, in the search engines and then your impression growth on new pages or sections. really overall presence, is something that, that, needs to be the new metric. It may be sound kind of fuzzy because it’s like, what does that all add up to? but it’s the growth of it. Getting that number to go in the right direction, I think is what’s really key.

John Jantsch (07:15.854)

There are technical aspects that Google Search Console can help you fix. So indexing, crawlability issues, load time for your website. So you definitely want to take a look at, there pages that Google’s excluding? Why? In some cases, you’ve told it to exclude those, but I’m finding that in a lot of cases, they can’t get to pages or entire sections of websites. You know, are there URLs that really

Are the wrong URLs like, you you’ve updated pages and you’ve changed names. mean, people do things like that all the time. is the site map, updated, is mobile performance solid? That is a huge, huge one. I, know, it is. They never tell you what the ranking factors are, but I, I, I’ve seen it myself every time a site slows down because we haven’t been paying attention or we haven’t updated something or they’ve uploaded, somebody’s uploaded a giant image that makes the homepage take forever to load.

rankings tank. there’s clearly a direct tie. All right, the last one I want to talk about is

Guiding Google Search Console will help guide your AI Content or at least your AI content optimization, right? So you can you can do the you know, you can feed actually the data from Google Search Console right into chat GPT And then you know type in something like, know based on these queries from Google Search Console Give them a list of your top ten, right help create content briefs that

that addresses these questions clearly and builds trust for a small business offering whatever service you offer. That kind of thing is going to give you such a head start, not into just what content you produce, but the right content. And that’s the best starting point. And so again, I’ve just scratched the surface on what I think are some of the key things that you ought to be thinking about from this highly underutilized tool.

John Jantsch (09:21.538)

This is a part of what we call a search visibility system that we’ve created as part of the strategy work that we do for clients to help them really develop that whole content roadmap, to help them be focused on the right content, to really be focused on intent. And I think that that, if you take nothing else away from today, we need to be spending most of our content information around intent, around searches.

branded searches for the things that people are looking that clearly does determine that we can determine probably means they’re trying to buy something. Spend our time and effort there on conversions. Don’t worry about traffic. Worry about visibility and overall impressions. All right. That’s it for today. Again, if you want any help, want to learn more about this, it’s just John at ducttapemarketing.com. I’d love to show you what we do and hopefully,

Keep tuning into the duct tape marketing podcast and I’ll keep talking about the new SEO among other things and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he explores the intersection of AI marketing and what it truly means to be human in an increasingly automated landscape.

We dive deep into why human-centered marketing is more essential than ever, how shared experiences and emotional marketing can outperform cold performance metrics, and why creative branding—especially the bold and unexpected kind—is the antidote to the AI-generated noise. If you’re wondering how your business can stand out in the age of AI and shifting consumer behavior, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways:

Human-centered marketing is the competitive edge in the AI era. While AI marketing tools are powerful, they can’t replicate genuine human connection, emotional marketing, or brand experiences built around shared values and trust.
Performance marketing has overshadowed the soul of branding. Mark challenges the overreliance on SEO, paid ads, and automation—urging marketers to reclaim storytelling, empathy, and creativity in their strategy.
Experiential marketing is key to creating emotional resonance. Mark emphasizes the need for shared experiences—both online and offline—that tap into what he calls collective effervescence, a psychological state where people feel connected, inspired, and part of something bigger.
Word-of-mouth marketing remains massively underutilized. Despite being one of the most trusted forms of promotion, most brands don’t budget for it. Building communities and customer advocacy should be a core part of any marketing strategy.
In a world of sameness, be audacious. Whether it’s creative branding or marketing disruption, Mark argues that the brands who dare to be bold—sometimes even weird—win attention and loyalty. AI can’t replicate originality.
Consumer behavior has shifted—and AI is influencing it. As consumers begin using AI to filter content and make decisions, marketers need to deliver clarity, brevity, and emotional depth. Attention is earned, not assumed.
Start with wrong to spark innovation. One of Mark’s most memorable tips: disrupt your thinking by flipping assumptions. Instead of optimizing the old way, ask what would happen if you did the opposite.

Chapters:

00:09 Introducing Mark Schaefer
00:59 Where Do Humans Fit in an AI Dominated World?
04:09 A World Without Shared Experiences
07:00 How to Out-Human AI
09:44 Embracing Every Day Awe
13:08 How AI is Changing Consumer Behavior
17:25 Story of the Book Cover
19:17 Start with Wrong

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Schafer. He’s a futurist and the bestselling author of several influential marketing books, including the content code known and marketing rebellion. He’s a marketing strategy consultant to many of the world’s leading brands and acclaimed keynote speaker and a college educator. His blog Grow is one of the most acclaimed marketing blogs globally and his podcast, The Marketing Companion,

is in the top 1 % of all business shows on iTunes. But we’re going to talk about his latest book today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. So Mark, welcome back to the show. You’ve been on several times.

MARK SCHAEFER (00:45.314)

Several times almost a regular

John Jantsch (00:47.76)

So I like to start with the title a lot of times. mean, what was kind of the genesis of that for you? Or is there something going on in the world today that says we need to be more audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (01:02.866)

Well, you know, when I, I never have a plan or a schedule to write a book. I only write a book when I see some problem going on that I get curious about. And the problem I see today is that we’re trying to discern where do humans fit in this new AI dominant world.

And we have this technology that’s nipping at the heels of our skill sets, in some cases nipping at the heels of our very careers. And so I really needed to unwind and unpack where are we going to fit, where are we going to thrive. So really the main idea of this book is to explore the

Parts and by the way, I mean, I’m not sugarcoating this saying Kumbaya. It’s all gonna be great. I’m saying no, no Kumbaya You know, there’s some serious things going on but there are some places that really are Uniquely human and it had been somewhat overlooked in the in the marketing

sphere in the marketing portfolio, I think we’ve become sort of intoxicated with performance marketing. And I mean, it’s important. And I’m talking about SEO and ads and optimizing, you know, our content and our ad purchases. That’s very, very important. But as we’ve kind of overcompensated with that, we’ve kind of forgot about the heart and soul of marketing.

which is this human connection. And so in the book, I look at things like word of mouth marketing, which we know is really important, but I would suggest almost nobody listening to this today has a line item on their budget for word of mouth marketing. I talk about experiential marketing and this idea of shared experiences, which are the, with this lonely.

MARK SCHAEFER (03:21.826)

depressed world saying we want more shared experiences and that again is a uniquely human thing and The overarching umbrella I guess is this word, you know audacious because if you’re merely competent you’re vulnerable competent is ignorable and Marketing really is is I have research in the book that shows in general how dull marketing and advertising

is and there is an opportunity to like shed that skin and really ignite something a little crazy because you know the bots are coming but we still own crazy.

John Jantsch (04:05.725)

You know, how much, again, I find myself blaming the pandemic for so many things on this show when I talk about changes. And, you know, there are societal changes that I think occurred during that period that, like I sit in a restaurant now waiting on my food to come and I watched the line and stream of people who come in and pick up their to-go order and run back to their car. And I,

MARK SCHAEFER (04:20.088)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:32.676)

That came, I think, from the pandemic, a lot of that. But I also, you know, we talk about this need for human interaction, but you almost feel like people are actually withdrawing farther by choice.

MARK SCHAEFER (04:47.134)

I agree with you. think remote working is another sort of symptom of something that occurred with the pandemic. This idea of maybe more comfort with isolation. I think the other thing is that today, each of us can be our own independent media streaming channel. So we can experience our entire world.

by ourselves through earbuds. We can stream all the movies and TV and music and books that we love. And nobody else even has ever heard of the things that we’re experiencing. And that’s a key idea in this book that compared to when you and I were growing up as kids, we have a world without shared experiences. You know, when I was a kid, you had to save your money for a record album.

John Jantsch (05:24.897)

News.

MARK SCHAEFER (05:45.634)

And once you got that record album, people would come over to your house to listen to it. You’d play it over and over again. You’d sing the words, you know, on the, on the liner notes. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to find somebody that had a car. You climb in the car and then you’d have pizza afterwards. And the whole thing is a social experience that is absolutely missing from an entire generation today. And they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re crying out.

John Jantsch (05:59.824)

You

MARK SCHAEFER (06:14.52)

for shared experiences. And that’s something that we can add in our marketing portfolio. When you bring people together in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t have to be an activation, it could even be the way you hold meetings. If you bring people together in this meaningful way, it creates some sort of electric kind of experience.

It creates this thing called collective effervescence. It’s this emotional contagion of awe. It’s everyday awe of being with people and creating something new. And I think that is one of the most overlooked opportunities in marketing today.

John Jantsch (07:02.872)

One of the core ideas of the book is that we have to think about out humaning AI. Did I say that right? So how do we do that? I mean, it’s not through IQ. So how do we do that?

MARK SCHAEFER (07:09.698)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:19.244)

Yeah. mean, isn’t that weird that when you think about it, that this is the first time in history where a technology has come along and we can’t take another class to transcend it. Right. I mean, we’re not going to be smarter than AI. And so, you know, the idea behind the book is one of the biggest issues. Well, it’s the biggest issue for any business today or any marketing

John Jantsch (07:30.384)

Right.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:49.038)

professional today is how is awareness. How do we stand out as the signal against the noise? And again, you know, AI is, is making that even worse because there it’s like an endless infinite noise. So, so how, what can we do? And what I did, John, is I got to meet the greatest creatives in the world. And there’s a story in the book is kind of like,

John Jantsch (08:00.95)

Just make a little noise.

MARK SCHAEFER (08:18.296)

how I started down this path and one door open and another door open. And it was just incredible gift, this amazing experience. And I got to learn what are the patterns? Is there something we can learn from their success that’s scalable to every business? And what I found is that there is. So your marketing message, the story that you tell the world has three parts.

It’s the story, the narrative, it’s where we tell it, and it’s who tells it. Now, what if we disrupted one of those things? We would be doing something that AI isn’t really thinking about right now. mean, AI is looking at the whole world and kind of giving you the best average answer of everything that’s happened in the past. But if you disrupt it,

John Jantsch (09:06.874)

Trying to average it.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:15.808)

and do something unexpected. Now you are moving toward a path where you’re going to stand out. And so the book is full of case studies, full of prompts, big companies, small companies, big budgets, no budgets, nonprofits. So there’s something in there for everybody to sort of like explore these patterns and apply it.

to a business or an organization of any size.

John Jantsch (09:47.536)

Give me an example, if you can think of one off the top of your head, of how a company or a brand can really embrace this idea of everyday awe.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:56.91)

every day off. Well, the example that I think is most relevant and personal to me, and I think this would be relevant to anybody, is so I hold a marketing retreat every year called The Uprising. And the problem I solve with this is, as you know, I used to this event called Social Slam. You were there. And I mean, I was having 600, 700 people

John Jantsch (10:21.486)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

MARK SCHAEFER (10:27.03)

And it was just a blur and it was stressful and I didn’t like it. So I created this new event some years later. It’s limited to 30 people. So it’s intimate. And we’re talking about our relevance in the future of marketing. Now I put my heart and soul into this and I think I did a good job. But when I got the feedback of the event, people told me something completely unexpected. They said this

was life-changing. I thought, what? What? Life-changing? mean, isn’t that a little heavy? But I heard this over and over again. And I never really had an explanation until I connected the dots with this idea of collective effervescence. So in this group, these 30 people, we hike together in the woods. We eat together, gourmet food, and we

Actually, it’s shared family style, right? We create every single moment is created to heighten interaction, to build on ideas. And as I read this idea of collective effervescence, I got this from this book called Awe by social psychologist, Dacher Keltner. And all of a sudden, OK, wait a minute.

That’s the difference. It’s this intimacy. It’s this emotional contagion that’s happening at my event that makes it unlike anything else. And so my marketing plan is add more awe. So it’s like, how do I do it even better? How do I create even more of these magical moments that create

you know, new ideas and epiphanies in the people that are there. Just the pure joy of listening to music or, you know, singing together or something like that. you know, what, what can I do to even add more off? That’s the marketing plan for my event. And so I challenge people in the book, you know, think about what you can do with your customer interactions, with your meetings.

MARK SCHAEFER (12:55.084)

With customer events, what if your marketing plan was add more off? How would that change the dynamic and make you into something different, something conversational, something unmissable, which is what we need to do today?

John Jantsch (13:13.552)

And the lesson of course for that is, I that’s the brand people want to gravitate towards, right? And I think that one of the things that, you know, everybody talks about this platform or this new tool or this new technology and how marketing has changed. But I’ve felt for the last 10 years, the way people buy has changed more. And that that’s what we ought to be paying more attention to. And I think that that’s going to even be

More relevant, you know, because they’re able, you know, think about how they could cut through all of the noise. Like they can take our 50 page ebook and say, give me the four. They can consume with AI as well as we can produce with AI. I think that that gives them even more leverage to only interact with brands that as you say, create every day off.

MARK SCHAEFER (14:02.242)

Yeah. And that’s an extraordinary point that is quite profound, John, is that, you know, a lot of the conversations out there, a lot of the content out there is about how AI is changing our business and changing our workflow. It’s creating a lot of new tools to perhaps unleash creativity. But we also need to be thinking about exactly what you’re saying is that AI is also changing consumer behavior.

It’s changing how it’s going to consume our content. It’s going to change how people make decisions. Because generally speaking, people don’t want to do the work. They’re averse to deep thinking. And so they’re going to abdicate that in many cases to AI. I think the idea of truth is going to be sort of mixed up. And we may be turning AI to AI.

John Jantsch (14:31.472)

100%.

John Jantsch (14:47.172)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:00.846)

you know, to truth. So I think that’s a very, it’s a big idea and certainly a worthy conversation about how AI is going to be.

John Jantsch (15:09.102)

Well, why don’t we just collaborate on another book, Mark, you and I will write that book. Well, let’s write that book.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:12.494)

We should, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

John Jantsch (15:16.752)

Well, I saw some research the other day and they were talking about, just a year ago, you know, how people were using AI, you know, what, what, what was the biggest use case, right? So producing content stuff you’d, you’d think, and that already in 2025, the fastest growing way that people are using AI is as a companion. yeah. And therapy. so, so that behavior that you’re talking about is happening and it will drive so much.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:26.786)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:36.504)

Therapy. Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:43.116)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that I saw that same study and it was sort of jaw dropping. And it’s funny because the day after I saw that study, I did a podcast episode with one of my co-hosts and it was kind of a strange episode about how do you keep working? How do you keep leading a business when you’re suffering? And so my co-hosts

John Jantsch (15:51.407)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:13.142)

relies on AI as a therapist. She’s actually built like custom GPTs to encourage her and counsel her when she’s suffering. I thought, wow, that is something else. I mean, that is really, I mean, okay, well, it’s working for her.

John Jantsch (16:34.8)

Well, you know, the right AI bot’s probably got a lot of licenses.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:43.256)

Well, and again, this also points to, again, the changes in consumer behavior, because think about it, there’s also this emerging preference for AI, let’s call synthetic relationships. And I think this research about the therapy is sort of a leading indicator of that.

John Jantsch (17:02.746)

Bye.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:10.208)

is that you can be in a relationship with this entity that always tells you the right thing. There’s no compromise. You don’t really have to work on the relationship. you know, wow, I mean, what are the implications of that going to be?

John Jantsch (17:17.296)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:25.808)

Yeah. Or worse always tells you what you want to hear, which is, becomes an enabler rather than a therapist. So, so there are many, many ideas in this book that, uh, that we’re not going to get to, um, because I want to veer off to like a really goofy thing that you did. Um, and, and that’s the cover. Um, so, so talk a little bit. mean, it, it’s obviously very on brand with the book, but, but.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:29.592)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:33.974)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:47.687)

right.

John Jantsch (17:54.011)

explain the concept behind the cover.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:56.802)

Well, this is a first in the world book and I’m very proud of it actually because it sort of demonstrates the ideas in the book. And it demonstrates it in a powerful way because if you think about books have been published the same way for 200 years, it’s almost impossible to disrupt a book. Believe me, I’ve tried. so this book, the cover of the book is a QR code. And what we did is,

John Jantsch (18:02.542)

Right.

John Jantsch (18:27.248)

For the video audience.

MARK SCHAEFER (18:27.306)

I uploaded. yeah, awesome. I uploaded the the book to a eye and uploaded some sort of generic art samples and a is generating. Abstract art interpretations of the stories in the book. So when you hover over the cover, it creates new covers endlessly.

based on the stories in the book. And we’re actually updating it every week. So there’s more and more stories that are possibilities for the cover. And people love it. It is different. And if you think about it, it’s disrupted the story. It’s disrupted where the story is told. It’s disrupting who’s telling the story. It’s not even a human. And I’m getting feedback, that even children love

playing with the pictures on the book. So, yeah, so I’m very proud of that. And yeah, thanks for mentioning it.

John Jantsch (19:35.296)

You bet. let’s wrap up today with like, if I’m listening to this and I’m thinking I need to do, I need to disrupt the narrative. What are like, what’s like the, you know, everybody wants the, me the one thing I have to do. What’s the one, two, three steps somebody ought to be doing right now to say, how do get ready for this?

MARK SCHAEFER (19:43.086)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (19:56.302)

Well, the one constant I saw in a lot of the creative thinking behind it is to start with wrong. And if you just sort of like think about iterating or changing a little bit, it doesn’t really lead to creative thinking. And some of the best creative thinking comes from, let’s flip the script and just look at what if everything was just wrong?

I I think the opportunity is this. If you look at most markets today, they’re just dull. They’re waiting to be disrupted. Every car commercial is the same. know, pizza, know, pizza is supposed to be fun and creative and the celebration. What’s the most creative thing going on in pizza? In America, we have this ad, nobody out pizzas the hut. What in the world does that mean? Can’t you do better than that? So look at, start with wrong.

That’s where we got this US brand, Liquid Death. The number one lesson I ever learned in marketing class, never associate your brand with death, right? I mean, I encourage you to go to YouTube and Google some of their ads. They’re shocking. They make you cringe. I actually was going to show an ad, one of their ads at a conference and it was turned down. They said, we can’t show that. And it’s a public ad.

John Jantsch (21:25.626)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:25.718)

Now, the guy who started that was not obsessed with water. He was obsessed with this idea of disrupting the market. And almost every market can be disrupted today because it’s so boring, especially in B2B. So that would be one idea. But the book is filled with so many ideas. But that was definitely a common theme I heard in my research.

John Jantsch (21:46.735)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.87)

Yeah, yeah, I laugh. My kids love like, you know, their refrigerators are full of liquid death. I’m like.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:59.918)

It’s just water!

John Jantsch (22:02.946)

Water! But I will say, you know, I mean, the message there is, you know, it’s the brand. It’s a connection to the brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about Audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (22:12.814)

Fastest growing beverage brand in America. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:26.282)

easy to find me. All you have to remember is businesses grow. That is my website. You can find my blog, my podcast, and my social media connections and the book we talked about today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

John Jantsch (22:43.726)

Yeah, and it’s Schaeffer with one A, two Es and one F. I mean, I have to look it up every time. I’m sorry. There’s so many ways to spell Schaeffer.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:48.844)

Yeah. Well, the other day I was checking into a hotel. I said, name is Mark with a K. She said, your name is Cark?

MARK SCHAEFER (23:01.72)

So nobody can sell Mark, let alone Schaefer. So don’t confuse him, John. Just go to Businesses Grow.

John Jantsch (23:08.088)

Okay. All right. Awesome. Again, it’s so great to see you, my friend, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

MARK SCHAEFER (23:15.31)

Thank you, John.

How to Think Strategically About AI Tools

How to Think Strategically About AI Tools written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Dan Sanchez

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Dan Sanchez, an AI marketer, consultant, and the creator behind AI-Driven Marketer. Dan has a deep passion for exploring how artificial intelligence can be used not just for automation, but as a co-pilot in crafting better strategies, solving complex business challenges, and enhancing marketing productivity.

During our conversation, Dan shared powerful insights on how AI is transforming the role of marketers and why approaching AI with a clear strategic mindset is more essential than ever. We explored the pitfalls of chasing the newest shiny tool and instead emphasized focusing on core business problems where AI can truly add value. Whether you’re overwhelmed by the flood of new tools or just starting out, Dan’s advice is rooted in the philosophy of strategy before technology—an ethos that’s been central to Duct Tape Marketing for over two decades.

Dan’s grounded approach to integrating artificial intelligence into marketing underscores the importance of being intentional and strategic. Rather than seeing AI as a threat or a gimmick, marketers can embrace it as a powerful tool to elevate their impact and performance.

Key Takeaways:

Start with strategy, not tools. Focus on identifying bottlenecks in your business processes before selecting any AI tools.
Use AI as a thinking partner. Tools like ChatGPT can enhance strategic thinking, not just content creation.
Go deep, not wide. Master one tool—like ChatGPT or Claude—instead of juggling a dozen, to get real value from AI in marketing.
Deep research is underutilized. Tools that simulate 20–40 hours of human research can drastically improve marketing strategy and productivity.
AI can reshape problem-solving. Learn to prompt AI effectively to assist with everything from competitive analysis to content ideation.
Stay focused, not overwhelmed. You don’t need to be an early adopter of every tool—start with meaningful experiments and scale from there.
AI will shift marketing roles. Embracing AI skills will be key to thriving in the future of marketing and business growth.

Chapters:

00:09 Introducing Dan Sanchez
01:57 Approaching AI Strategically
04:04 Creating New Things with AI
06:36 Evolution of AI Prompting
08:50 Humans Changing Role in Marketing
11:38 Developing Skills vs Delegating Tasks
13:51 AI Agents Affect on Marketing
17:50 Advice on Using Deep Research

More About Dan Sanchez:

Check out Dan Sanchez’s Website
Connect with Dan Sanchez on LinkedIn

Duct Tape Transcript

Sara Nay (00:01.468)

Hello and welcome to the duct tape marketing podcast. This is your host, Sara and a today I’m stepping in for John Jance and I have a guest on the show, Dan Sanchez. So Dan is an AI marketer, consultant and creator with a passion of diving into the latest tech innovations. He specializes in developing cutting edge marketing strategies that leverage AI to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. So welcome to the show, Dan.

Danchez (00:27.64)

Thanks for having me on, Sarah.

Sara Nay (00:28.978)

Of course, I’m excited to talk to you today. We first connected on LinkedIn because you had been posting about AI and thinking strategically about AI and speaking to marketers directly, which all of that resonates with me. But when I reached out to you, I was commenting about one of your posts and I’m just curious, do you remember what you said in response to my initial message to you? No, I put you on the spot.

Danchez (00:48.364)

I don’t. If we’re talking about the comments, I’m like, I don’t know. I comment, I mean, I’m dropping 200 comments a day or a week on LinkedIn. And so they all blur together sometimes and I’m like, I don’t know what I said, when I said it.

Sara Nay (00:56.36)

I’m sure.

No worries. Well, I sent you a direct message and you talked about how duct tape marketing was one of the initial blogs that you were following back when RSS feeds were a thing.

Danchez (01:02.882)

or the direct message. Yes, no.

That’s right. It was Copy Blogger, Duct Tape Marketing, and Seth Godin were the three. I was transitioning from graphic design to being a marketer, and a marketing kind of mentor to me. He’s like, hey, back when RSS was a thing too, he’s like, go to create a Google feed account and subscribe to these three blogs. You need to read them every day. And so I did for a very long time.

Sara Nay (01:29.33)

I love it. just brought that up because I think it’s very interesting. Like you’ve obviously been in the marketing space for a while now talking about RSS and original blogs. And now today the focus of this conversation is going to be all about AI. And so it’s just interesting to think about the evolution that we’ve had over the last several years and the pace of the evolution that we’re going through right now with all things AI. Well, great.

And that’s what I want to dive into deeper. I’ve noticed through your posts and the content that you’re putting out, you’re talking a lot about approaching AI strategically to avoid overwhelm. at Duct Tape Marketing, we’ve been saying strategy before tactics for 20 years now. At this point, we’re saying strategy before technology because you need to have a solid strategy in place. But I would love to open that up to you. How are you advising because it can be overwhelming with all the tools that are being developed and all the

the stuff that’s being put out there on AI. So how do you advise people to approach the world of AI strategically?

Danchez (02:24.27)

You know, there’s a couple different approaches, but it’s funny because I just got a DM yesterday and it was like, hey man, heard you did a talk on the 25 new tools for AI in your session recently. What tools should I use? And I was like, I don’t know, what problems are you facing? It’s kind of like that whole strategy thing. It’s kind of like, well, there’s lots of tools. They can do lots of stuff. And there’s some general purpose tools that can cover a lot of different things.

Sara Nay (02:44.892)

Yeah.

Danchez (02:51.822)

But what’s the core obstacle you’re running into your business with right now? Where’s the choke point for your systems? What’s causing you pain on a daily or weekly basis? Because those are the things I want to look for first as a consultant and see how AI might be able to help that. It’s funny because a lot of times people actually don’t need AI, they just need clarity and a strategic focus set. But I do find that AI is changing the game because it’s allowing us

Sara Nay (03:00.774)

Yeah.

Danchez (03:20.982)

not only to automate and do things faster or even better, but it’s helping us think better and more strategically if you kind of know how to use it as a co-pilot. So that’s the first thing I’m kind of trying to help people understand is like this thing becomes a very good strategy thinking partner. Even if you can kind of, you just kind of have to give it a start. It’s not going to proactively come after you and be like, Hey, so what’s your plan for this? Hey, what’s your strategy? Hey, what were you thinking here? But if you proactively ask it for feedback,

Sara Nay (03:26.93)

Mm.

Danchez (03:48.608)

or for considerations or ask questions that it can ask you and then give you feedback on, it’s amazing how much more strategically you can think when you start using AI as a co-pilot.

Sara Nay (04:00.528)

Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of my early aha moments with AI is at first I was just using it or thinking about it as like a content creation tool. was thinking of it as something that like helps take stuff off my plate. But when I shifted to thinking of it as a thought partner and started using it in my strategic thinking and planning, like that’s where my view on what AI can do completely changed. And I know you have a story that you talk about one of your early on experiences with chat, GBT, I think you call it your Mediterranean ice cream moment. Do you mind explaining what that experience was for you?

Danchez (04:26.838)

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it’s when ChatGPT first came out. I’d been a huge skeptic of AI before ChatGPT came out. I’d seen some of the early pre-ChatGPT stuff like Jarvis, which was using its 2.5 API ChatGPTs back then. It was like a copywriting tool and I was like, okay, it’s starting to get things. But when ChatGPT launched, it woke everybody up, including me. And I remember sitting there and being like, well, is this thing just really good at regurgitating?

You know, is it like, because remember before we had like Drift, you know, an AI chat bot and we had Intercom and like they were all pretty bad. None of them were good. So I was like, you know, can this come up with original ideas? Most original ideas are usually a combining of two different things that don’t normally come together. And humans do it all the time to come up with new ideas. So was like, well, let’s find something that doesn’t exist on the internet and just ask for it to create something. So I figured recipes would be hard because I’m like, well, that’s a whole different dimension. It’s got to understand taste and

recipe and how things come together in order to form new flavors. That’s pretty tough. And then I went searching, I’m like, what’s a recipe that doesn’t exist? So I just picked out two random flavors. I was like ice cream Mediterranean. I went and Google searched it. Could not find it. And then search and said, hey, make me a recipe for Mediterranean ice cream. And it punched out a bunch of ingredients. was like, you know what? This would actually work. And that’s when I realized, I’m like, it has the ability to come up with new things.

If you’re willing to guide it direct it and that changed everything for me because that was the missing piece That’s what to me made it artificial intelligence is it was able to actually think through and come up with a very Kind of elaborate thing because making recipes is kind of hard if you’re not pretty familiar with it And that was that was a big unlock for me

Sara Nay (06:07.035)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:10.812)

Did you try the recipe? Did you actually taste the ice cream?

Danchez (06:13.125)

No, no, no, I did not make the ice cream, but I remember looking at the ingredient list and thinking like that was workable. I wonder what else this can do. And then I moved on and started knocking out other ones, but that was the first big one. I was like, ah, this isn’t just delivering something back. This isn’t just summarizing what it’s found. You can mash up new things with this together.

Sara Nay (06:19.3)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:32.038)

Yeah, that’s great. Recently we have these big bushes in our backyard and they’ve been bothering us for years, but not enough to actually do something about it. And we finally decided to rip them out. And before like, I would have had to like go to gardening stores and figure out what to plant and like talk to a number of people and spend all this time like designing. But instead I took a picture and I put it into chat GPT and I asked like, you know, we’re in Boise, Idaho and this full sun and all the things that I needed to know.

Danchez (06:57.485)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:00.254)

And I ended up like designing this whole space of plants to put in that, in that place. And while I was going through that experience, I had an aha moment of like my role, like problem solving has completely changed. Like how I go about problem solving is different because now what I need to get really good at is prompting AI to help me solve problems and to push it for like further and to redirect things versus before, you know, I was going out and doing all that stuff manually.

And so that was an example of just like an aha moment of like how I solve problems is completely different than it used to be.

Danchez (07:34.734)

you actually don’t need to learn how to prompt AI as much as you’d think anymore. The AI models before you did because it was a little squirrely. Kind of like if you’ve done AI video right now, currently that is very squirrely, right? You try to prompt it and it’s like, it’s all over the place and the characters are disappearing and reappear and you’re like, my gosh, I got to really hone this thing and get what I want. But it was like that in the beginning. Like it couldn’t go that far without going off the rails in some way back in like 3.5 and early for chat GPT-4.

Sara Nay (07:43.196)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:03.182)

But nowadays it’s gotten so good at anticipating what you want that I just talk to it like it’s a person. I’m like, Hey, chat, you put interesting question for you. My dishwasher is not working and I’ve already tried to troubleshoot it through some YouTube videos, but it’s just not working. here’s, here’s what I’m seeing. And here’s what’s happening. It’s turning on, but it’s flooding with water, but things aren’t getting cleaned. I don’t hear it running and it’ll just start asking you questions and you just have.

Sara Nay (08:09.777)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:28.652)

dialogue with it, almost like it’s an expert in your pocket. You can call up any time. And I was using the voice model as talking to it. but I find I’m doing it with like that all the time, whether I’m assessing my own strategic position in the market, whether I’m just asking to come up with a LinkedIn post. I’m just talking to it like it’s an assistant that I just need to give us enough context in order to carry out the task.

Sara Nay (08:34.311)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (08:49.904)

Yeah, that’s a great point. I’ve definitely seen it’s improved drastically over the last year, I would say, in terms of not having to engineer as much with the prompting. I’m curious, we haven’t shifted too much into the conversation of marketers. And so there’s lot of unknown in a lot of industries, but marketing is obviously being deeply impacted. And you had a great LinkedIn post that went out this week that I saw about AI tools are potentially going to replace humans in the future. And so I would just love to hear your take on

To the marketers that are listening to this, what do they need to be thinking of moving forward in their roles as marketers? Is there an opportunity to evolve and shift? Or what do you recommend for those that are feeling a little bit uncertain about the industry that we’re in right now?

Danchez (09:33.036)

There is a lot of uncertainty. And I tried to think about the uncertainty in scenario planning methods, where it’s like, OK, let’s say it is like we’re going to lose 90 % of marketing jobs. You’re like, well, who are the 10 % that do have jobs? And what do I need to be in that 10 %? So I think about it like that. But I think about on the other side, let’s say this is going to be like every other technology revolution. Well, there’s going to be a whole ton of new jobs that exist.

Sara Nay (09:34.695)

Yeah.

Danchez (10:01.09)

What’s gonna be in those new jobs? Well, they’re probably all gonna be AI driven. So in either scenario, it’s probably going to be who’s me to become AI driven, right? And it’s probably gonna land somewhere in between. It’s probably not gonna be like this glorious thing. There’s probably gonna be good, there’s gonna be bad, there’s gonna be some loss on some side. I did recently post because a lot of people, there’s been this trending topic on LinkedIn that I really had an epiphany. like, you know, it’s not gonna be all that.

Kind of like this idea that like human first is going to be the one that powers it. Like AI frees us up to do the more human things. And I’m like, that be true. There will certainly be a place where a lot of companies lean into being more human, more service oriented. And those will be great and they’ll win. There will be a whole nother set of businesses that win from just being more fully automated because somehow through AI, they create systems that deliver more value at just a much lower price. And you know what people, a lot of people will do that.

Like it used to be that you’d have a tax filer help you file your taxes and almost everybody’s using TurboTax now, right? Unless you have a company in some kind of more complicated tax situation and you are hiring a CPA, but I’d still be even a little nervous to be a CPA right now, unless you’re like a really good one, you know? So I think a lot of businesses will be automated and there’ll be people that go into the whole all human thing and the cost difference between the two will probably be pretty dramatic, but there will be a lot of ways to win. But I think…

Sara Nay (10:57.607)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:11.824)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (11:25.89)

What will help the most is trying to figure out what different paths will happen in the future and then finding the common denominator around them. The common denominator I’m seeing is that AI skills are going to be a big piece of it.

Sara Nay (11:39.952)

Yeah, absolutely. I heard someone talk recently about if you’re a marketer, really anyone in a role is basically writing down everything that you’re working on on a regular basis and then doing a bit of audit on that work saying, like, is this increasing in value because of AI? Is this decreasing in value because of AI or is this staying consistent moving forward? And so if you thought about anything like that, auditing your time and your skill sets to see what you should continue to leverage and grow on versus maybe start delegating the different tools and solutions.

Danchez (12:09.336)

For me, it’s probably a little harder because I’m an AI educator. like I, I, for my job, I literally get to waste some time experimenting and using these things so that I can report on whether it’s actually helpful or not. I find the process of auditing on a regular basis to be pretty burdensome. I’m like, like, I wish I would just like audit my days more. In fact, I’ve even thought about going into making a project in chat GPT to be like,

Sara Nay (12:12.294)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.144)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (12:36.642)

here’s what I thought I would get done, here’s what I didn’t get done, here’s some extra stuff and just dictate into it real quick to kind of keep like a daily journal and kind of a little bit of a coach. It’s gotten way better at that recently. But it’s, I don’t know, I don’t think I would do that. I think on larger projects, I think it’s really helpful, especially if you can bring some of that data back into AI because it’s learning now and can remember things across different chats now and it will get better over time. I think that will become a strategic advantage. But yeah, I…

for anything new in businesses, you do have to start small and kind of test your way there. I will say it is probably like, there’s enough effort and a momentum in society going towards AI, especially with businesses right now that I promise it’s worth at least just going deep into chat GPT. It’s the main one. And I heard somebody say even recently like, like I know chat GPT, but like I want to go beyond beginner. And I’m like, no, like trust me, all the pros are using chat GPT too.

Sara Nay (13:08.764)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:29.308)

Hmm.

Danchez (13:31.958)

Like if anything, they’re only spending more time in that tool because they’re finding it more and increasingly valuable. Just don’t waste time learning all the tools. Like literally learn that one. And then if you have time and you have a need, start learning some of the other ones. But time spent learning how to leverage Chat GPT specifically. And if you like Claude, go with Claude or Jim and I. Like pick one of the main ones and then just hone in that one craft in order to make the most of it.

Sara Nay (13:58.074)

Yeah, that’s how my brain works with it all as well. Like I’ve gone all in on chat, GBT, and that’s where I typically live every day. but I know other people out there, they’re like, I use this for this, this for this. And I’m like, how do you have time for all of those things? Like I have to go deep in one to actually be able to use it to some of its potential versus, know, going through all the different tools. So I think that’s great advice. I’m curious, I’m part of a mastermind and AI mastermind. And were talking last week about how

Danchez (14:09.442)

Yeah, I don’t know.

Sara Nay (14:24.614)

websites and marketing in general is going to have to shift because of the AI agents world. Where right now we’re designing websites for humans and ads for humans and eventually, you know, it might be agents going to these different websites to make buying decisions for their people. And so have you thought or talked much about how marketing might shift in the next, I would say six months to a year with the idea of agents becoming more of a thing or more of a focus?

Danchez (14:52.13)

Yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t think it’s going to change much in the next six months. AI agents, in my opinion, they’re just not a thing right now for the most part. we’re calling, what most agents are, or what are labeled as agents, they’re not agents. There’s a few exceptions, and I’ll talk about those in a second, but most agents are what I’m calling intelligent automation. They are just automated sequences, like we had before with marketing automation, know, like the little drag and drop builders. They’re just that.

Sara Nay (15:00.455)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (15:13.906)

Mm.

Sara Nay (15:18.257)

Yep.

Danchez (15:20.086)

with one of the modules being ChatGBT. That’s it. Some of them are slightly more sophisticated because you’re giving a little bit of autonomy to AI to choose between a few different tools and maybe it’s not injecting a prompt, it’s actually got access to a database. that’s starting to feel more agentic, but it’s not like this fully autonomous thing that can go out shopping for us. It’s just not. Now there’s some precursor tools out there that you’re like, that’s definitely agent-ish.

but they’re not good yet. OpenAI has operator baked into chat GPT. You gotta pay the $200 a month license to get access to it. It doesn’t work well. Manus is the big one people are talking about from China. It also doesn’t work well. There’s just too many holes in the system. It maxes out too often because the server space isn’t ready. The memory isn’t ready. We have all the ingredients to make agents right now, but we’re still…

The cost of compute needs to come down a little bit. The context window needs to go up a little bit. We need to be able to give it more access to more things. know, all these, there’s a lot of talk right now about giving it access to like, Google just launched its agent to agent framework so that it can interface, different tools can interface. Agents can work with other agents from other tools. You know, like these kinds of standards and models have to be developed to create the infrastructure for it to happen. Right now, it’s not happening. The one agent that I’ve seen that is actually good,

It’s agentic and it’s worth, it’s like one of the most underutilized AI features out there right now is deep research. It is going and doing a lot of work. And I love it. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. If you’re a chat GPT user now, you’re paying for plus and you’re not using all 10 of the instances of that you get every single month. You haven’t figured it out yet. I promise the best advice I give is like upgrade just for one month, upgrade to the $200 a month one. So you can get 120 instances of it.

Sara Nay (16:49.744)

Yes.

Danchez (17:12.462)

and just throw everything you can at it, practice at it. You get 120 of them, like throw away things at it and just try it. It’s different than using chat GPT because it’s going and doing like 20 to 40 hours worth of human work for you, which means you kind of, like I said, prompting wasn’t good a minute ago, but for deep research, prompting actually is more strategic because it’s less of a prompt and more of like a mini project charter if you think about it.

Sara Nay (17:18.545)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (17:36.294)

Mm-hmm.

Danchez (17:37.676)

you kind of need to put some barriers on like where you want it to go, what you want it to do, what you want it to accomplish, where you want it to not go before you give it 40 hours of work. Even though it’s doing it in 20 minutes, you got to remember these reports are so sophisticated. You’re like, that would have taken a human a long time. But that’s the most agentic thing that I’ve seen out there. That’s remarkably good right now.

Sara Nay (17:46.649)

Yeah, yeah.

Sara Nay (18:00.004)

Yeah, I use deep research a lot for things like competitive research if we’re working with a client or if I’m creating a new presentation and I want some data to like back it up, I’ll have it create initial research to put together that. I’m curious, do you have any other examples of how people might start wrapping their head around using deep research?

Danchez (18:18.796)

out a few. There’s one prompt that I fell in love with and it went like super viral on LinkedIn. It’s like my most viral post to date was a deep research prompt and it’s really useful. So it is, I will give it to you to script out. I’m not going to read the whole thing because it’s kind of long, but I’ll give it to you. You can put it in the show notes, okay? But it’s essentially a prompt that goes and collects all the questions your audience is asking about your expertise, okay? And it goes and searches Reddit.

Quora, forums, and social to go and find them all and then organize them into categories and then rank stack them so that you can get at a glance, what are the most frequently asked questions your audience is asking about the thing that you do or the thing that you sell, whatever category that is. And that’s just so helpful to see. And it actually like not only rank stacks it, but actually gives you a header for each one and then put bullet points of the exact how they’re wording the questions with the link to the source so you can spot check it.

It’s so helpful because as a content marketer, it’s a lot of things are still done by content, right? Like that’s like my planning path. I don’t, I used to have to just have a lot of conversations on social or put out polls or just talk to a lot of customers. Now I can just extract it from the internet in 15 minutes and have a pretty dang good path of like what I need to be talking about on social or on podcasts or blogs.

Sara Nay (19:42.226)

That’s amazing. It was a great example. We’ve, this isn’t a deep research thing, but it’s chat GPT thing. We’ve started recording a lot of our sales calls and that’s just been really great content to put into GPT as well to analyze not only from a, can our sales team be doing better, but also a marketing content perspective, because now we’re capturing exactly, as you said, exactly how prospects phrase certain pain points and things they’re struggling with. And then we’re able to create marketing content that speaks directly to them moving forward.

So I love that example. All right, Dan. Yeah, give me one more. Give me one more.

Danchez (20:13.922)

I got one more for deep research, unless you want to wrap up. Because the deep research prompts are a little bit more sophisticated, something I’ve started doing is if I want to use a deep research prompt to dive deep, and maybe I’m thinking about launching a new product, or I’m about to do something big, and I don’t want to just do it willy nilly, I want to have a substantial conversation with AI about it, I will start it off in 4.0, just talk about, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Help me build a prompt that would do really well in Chet GPT’s deep research.

ask me some questions. This takes time. I’ll tell it generally what I’m going after. It’ll ask me some questions, get clarity. It’ll craft the prompt. Then I’ll switch it to the O1 Pro model within that same window or the O1 thinking model. And then on deep research, I’m like, hey, that prompt above, go and do your thing. It’s like, because it’s already crafted the prompt for me. Then it’ll go do the deep research, come back with the refindings. I’ll read it and switch it back to 4.0 or maybe even a different thinking model.

Sara Nay (21:02.556)

Go do it. Yeah.

Danchez (21:12.238)

depending on what you’re going after, and then have a conversation about the research and pick it apart. But now it’s got this like big research report in there that then you can have a conversation with AI to be like, okay, well, it looks like this, like, what do you think? And then you can have a conversation and dialogue about the research, which is kind of a fun way to do it is chat GPT, deep research, and then going back to talking to chat GPT about it after the deep research report.

Sara Nay (21:15.952)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (21:36.508)

Yeah, that’s really interesting because you’re using it in that sense in that example as a research assistant with the deep research. And then you’re going into more of the thought partner co-pilot mode when you’re going into conversation. Very cool. Well, thanks, Dan. Is there anything else that you want to share before we part ways today in terms of anything on the topic of AI overwhelm and strategic thinking?

Danchez (21:43.02)

back into copilot mode. Yeah.

Danchez (21:57.294)

For anybody that’s listening to this and thinking they’re behind on the AI train, you’re not behind. It’s still very, very early. I promise. I’ve just got back from a conference just two weeks ago. People were asking all kinds of questions and I could tell just from the types of questions and their hunger they had that this is still extremely early. Like it is not too late. I know the hype has been crazy over the last two years, but as far as marketers actually using it in a meaningful way on a weekly or daily basis, very few. So.

It generally pays to be early on these trends, but don’t be overwhelmed with trying everything. Just taking some of the things we’ve talked about in this episode and practicing it and finding use cases that are meaningful for you. Again, look for those daily or weekly things you use all the time and start experimenting with AI and count it and write it off as like education time rather than, I wasn’t as productive as I was hoping it would be. Your first couple of swings at it are just going to take time. It took us all time to learn how to Google. It took us all time to learn how to actually write our first blog post.

It’ll take you time with AI, but it’s early and putting in the reps now will pay dividends later.

Sara Nay (23:00.402)

Yeah, that’s great advice. I always like to think we’re all learning together right now on this. We’re all learning together. Well, where can people connect with you online, Dan?

Danchez (23:04.12)

That’s right.

Danchez (23:08.648)

You can find my podcast wherever podcasts are, AIDrivenMarketer.com. Sorry, it’s anywhere you search AIDrivenMarketer.com on any podcast app. It’s also on YouTube. It’s a video podcast. And LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com slash ian slash digital marketing Dan is my most active social network.

Sara Nay (23:27.026)

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Dan, and thank you all for listening to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. We will see you next time.

Build Trust by Saying What Others Won’t

Build Trust by Saying What Others Won’t written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Marcus Sheridan

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Marcus Sheridan, renowned speaker, author of They Ask, You Answer, and a leading voice in the world of content marketing and business transparency. Marcus built the most visited swimming pool website in the world and has delivered over 750 keynotes, including TEDx appearances. His revolutionary marketing strategy focuses on one central idea: businesses that earn trust win, and they do it by saying what others won’t.

During our conversation, Marcus unpacked core principles from his latest book, Endless Customers, including how to dominate your market by becoming a known and trusted brand. We explored how customer trust, video marketing, and self-service tools aren’t just trends—they’re necessities in today’s AI-influenced digital landscape. From debunking lazy content tactics to reimagining how businesses present pricing, Marcus delivers actionable insights that challenge conventional wisdom and demand transparency at every level of the buyer journey.

If your inbound marketing feels stale or your SEO strategies are falling flat, it might be time to rethink what you’re willing to say. As Marcus says, “The rule breakers become the rule makers.”

Key Takeaways:

Trust is the Ultimate Marketing Strategy: Brands that openly address customer questions—especially around pricing, problems, and comparisons—earn customer trust and outperform competitors.
The New Rules of SEO: As AI marketing tools rise and Google becomes less reliable, companies must focus on creating value-driven content and video that educates, differentiates, and converts.
Video Content is King: A single, thoughtful video can be repurposed across your website, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—maximizing content reach and sales conversion.
Media Company Mindset: Businesses must think like media companies—capturing attention across platforms and repurposing content for ongoing impact.
Self-Service Tools Drive Conversions: Tools like self-scheduling software and pricing estimators not only empower buyers but can double conversion rates by offering more control and transparency.
Embrace Transparent Selling Techniques: The most successful businesses aren’t afraid to discuss costs, risks, and trade-offs. Honest content builds long-term loyalty.
Content Repurposing Boosts Efficiency: One piece of content—especially in video format—can fuel multiple channels, reducing workload while expanding visibility.
AI Can Amplify Content Strategy: Rather than fearing AI, smart businesses use it to generate customer questions, create outlines, and brainstorm unique, value-driven content ideas.

Chapters:

[00:09] Introducing Marcus Sheridan
[02:10] Building a Known and Trusted Brand
[06:18] Thinking Like a Media Company
[11:20] Using AI to Help With Promotion
[15:25] Mitigating Risk for Customers
[20:05] Controlling the Conversation

More About Marcus Sheridan:

Check out Marcus Sheridan’s Website
Connect with Marcus Sheridan on LinkedIn
Read Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader by Marcus Sheridan

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.93)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Shane Murphy-Reuter. He’s the president and go-to-market. I guess you just call that GTM, don’t you? At Calendly, the platform helping individuals, teams, and organizations create better meeting experiences by simplifying complex scheduling. He’s focused on driving brand awareness and demand by ensuring alignment between sales.

marketing and CX. So Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (00:32.607)

Great to be here. Yes, we shorten it to GTM, but call it whatever you want. Yeah, no, it’s awesome to be your big fan of the show. So great to talk.

John Jantsch (00:41.07)

Thank you. So I’m going to talk about, I’m going to ask this question in the context of Calendly, but I think that this applies really to a lot of businesses out there. I Calendly started as a small idea of a technology for scheduling, just scheduling. And it’s certainly grown to something much bigger. That’s something that I think happens to a lot of companies you want to talk a little bit about. I know you’re

You haven’t been there from the beginning, but you want to talk a little bit about the evolution of that thinking in Calendly?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (01:13.087)

Yeah, of course. Well, I’ve actually only been at Calendly now, I think four months. I like to write it down, know, the expectations are lower. And so, yeah, I haven’t seen the journey from inside, but actually I’ve known Tope for, who’s the CEO of Calendly for about five or six years. You know, I’ve been very much watching it from the sidelines. And I would say also, if you look at my background, the companies that I tend to join are at a very similar stage to Calendly where

they’ve invented some new technology to solve some sort of pain point for a customer type and then have that exponential growth when they sort of like crack the market a little bit to get that product market fit. And then they start to think about, where maybe growth is starting to slow a little bit in that original market and where to go from here. And I think Calendly has been on that journey. Originally,

John Jantsch (01:51.778)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (02:03.561)

we solved just that scheduling problem, that one problem around how do two people schedule meetings together. And it’s been very, very successful. But now the question is, well, how do you extend from here? And I think a lot of companies get that wrong, frankly. Like think there’s broadly two paths, right? You either take the technology that you’ve built and apply it to different markets.

John Jantsch (02:28.077)

Yes.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (02:28.409)

Or you take a target market or a customer segment that you have strength with with your original product and then extend the product offerings that you provide to those customers. And certainly, Canley’s strategy from here and hopefully very, very soon we’ll be launching our second major, major product is to really extend the products that we offer within a certain target market because we just believe there’s massive opportunity there to like.

solve other points in the relationship management lifecycle for our customers. it’s been, yeah, I’ve been here four months, but I think that the account is on like a pretty, classic journey that I’ve seen a lot of companies go through.

John Jantsch (03:07.394)

Do you, do you feel like you are on the journey to define a category or you have defined a category? You mentioned relationship management. I don’t know that people would have applied what, what Cowan Lee initially started doing to that term. mean, do feel like you’re, you’re categorizing, you know, a new way of working.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (03:24.641)

It’s a great question. think scheduling, our original product, we created the category, right? We are now basically the Kleenex for scheduling, which is amazing. I think the challenge though with it is different categories of different towns, right? Different total addressable markets. And I think for scheduling, it is a relatively narrow use case, right? Like it’s, while it’s extremely important for our customers, it’s narrow, but we have this incredible hook into the customer.

John Jantsch (03:28.034)

Yeah. Right.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (03:54.753)

How can we add more? And to be fair, I think for a go-forward strategy, we think about relationship management software more generally. No, I think the new areas that we’ll go into are existing categories like, I don’t want to give up our product roadmap, but you can imagine the types of other relationship management softwares that are out there, like the CRMs, et cetera. I think where our unique advantage is really in the customer types that we’ll go in service. And I think that we can

if we can build the software with hyper focus on kind of these SMBs and solopreneurs, I think that we can have great success relative to the incumbents that are in the market. So to answer the question more directly, I think we’ve done this category creation thing with scheduling and we’ll continue to hopefully dominate that market. From here though, I think it’s more about innovating within how we deliver in existing categories.

John Jantsch (04:52.974)

I’m sure you maybe talk about this in closed door meetings, maybe worry about it even sometimes, but how does a company like Calendar, especially in the early days when you essentially created a product that had a certain set of features and the Microsofts, the Googles of the world could easily squash that. You know, one day wake up and say, we’re going to do that. How do you kind of ward off that? do you worry about, again, I know you’ve grown to the point where,

You probably have more market share in scheduling than some of the big people that, you know, that could have done that. But do you ever sit around and worry about, Hey, we have to create more features or get more hooks in, so that we’re not just this one trick pony that gets squashed.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (05:36.421)

Yeah, that’s a great question. And for sure, I think if you look at it from the outside, you may imagine that something like scheduling is very, very easy to replicate. And I think this is where this hyper focus on your most fervent customers is so important. If you talk to the majority of our customers, their time is their money. A lot of them actually sell their time. If you’re a coach,

John Jantsch (06:03.032)

Sure.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (06:03.263)

you know, your therapist, et cetera. And then others are, if you’re in sales, like your time is how you get out there. And therefore an incredible scheduling experience is really important. So for sure, there are many competitors out there, lots of competitors, but because they just don’t have that hyper focus like we do around the true intricacies of the details of the problem set of our customers, they have not been able to compete. And for what it’s worth,

When we look at our data, for sure we’re hearing a little bit more about other competitors popping up as you would expect as any company scales. But in reality, it’s not impacted our business in the way that I think from the outside in you would expect. And so we actually think that we have a better opportunity to disrupt other incumbents than the other way around, given just how critically important this is for our customers. They’re not going to go and buy a slightly less

John Jantsch (06:53.304)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (07:01.419)

good product, they’re just not gonna do it, they want the best.

John Jantsch (07:04.962)

One of the things I’ve seen software companies do as they they grew is like, let’s take on this and this and let’s do email and let’s do the CRM part of it. And it makes a lot of sense, right? It’s like, I’ve got this end to end product, but then they make compromises in every single category because it’s very hard to have the one thing that fits all. mean, is there any danger you think in trying for somebody to actually start trying to take market share by adding

you know, more product that’s already out there and actually diluting what they’re good at.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (07:37.345)

is an absolute risk and one that you need to be extremely careful of. So every company I’ve worked at as we’ve gone on this multi-product journey, there is a constant debate around how much resource should you put into continuing to improve your core product versus how much should you put into new innovative areas. So it is a debate and we will never stop innovating on our core of scheduling. I do think though, as you think about like,

the product areas that you move into, the question has to be, what’s your unique advantage to win there? And I don’t like, I’ve seen companies just sort of go, we’re just going to go in there, we’re going to build in and say, well, okay, well, you really thought about the strategy and it can’t just be like a price thing, right? That’s not enough. And I think typically that unique advantage tends to come from, as I said before, one either is some sort of technology advantage that you have.

John Jantsch (08:12.792)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (08:33.375)

I’ll give an example of Webflow where I worked last. Webflow’s unique technology advantage was that built a way for you to manipulate code in a visual environment. Very easy for them to take that technology and move it beyond just building websites into how you build other types of technology. They have a technology advantage they can apply to different markets. For Calendly, think the reason Calendly has been so successful are two things. One,

I do think that we have a unique penetration within a type of customer that I mentioned before, that we really understand and can, as we go into these new areas, make sure that we’re addressing their unique needs for a new product. like cars, right, before it used to be Model T, any color you want as long as it’s black, which is fine when you’ve got a technology advantage like Henry Ford had. He had a technology advantage, so you mass market it.

John Jantsch (09:24.27)

you

Shane Murphy-Reuter (09:30.205)

Now that’s crazy because that technology advantage no longer exists. You have every million type of car for different types of very specific segments of the market. And so as we think about our go for product strategy, think some of it, I wouldn’t say we necessarily have a technology advantage, but I think that we have a data advantage in being so hooked so clearly into the customer’s most important thing, which is their time and the data around that.

And then we have a unique advantage, I think, in making sure that when we build those new product areas, they’re beautifully connected and integrated with scheduling and that we build for that segment. And we don’t try and build the Model T, we try and build a very, very, very tailored experience for the customer set that we know that we have the greatest right to win in. And for what it’s worth, we also believe that the incumbents in the relationship management software market have left that market behind. And so I think there’s a…

great opportunity for us to win. But back to the original question, yes, of course we need to balance and make sure that we’re not under-investing in our core. I use the phrase internally at companies that if you kill the cash cow, nobody gets milk. And so, yeah, you want to make sure that the core business, which is for us scheduling, continues to, we continue innovating.

John Jantsch (10:55.394)

One of the things that’s really tempting as companies grow to the size that Connolly has now, I mean, some of your original customers clicked on a button, signed up. It was just them in their house doing scheduling and it worked for them. It was awesome. It was easy, no friction. And now you’re starting to have enterprise con. That security and adoption and uptime and all these kinds of things really have to be sold.

How do you message first off? Let’s let we can talk about operationally as well, but how do you message to such distinctly different sales channels?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (11:38.185)

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think about this through two different lenses. The first one is obviously the who you’re going after. And for what it’s worth, typically in enterprise companies, particularly for a company like Calendly, the user within that company tends to test it out first. And the user is the person that has that problem. So a salesperson within an enterprise company will go, this is really painful scheduling.

John Jantsch (12:00.429)

Mm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (12:06.625)

I’ve heard by Cano, you’ll go check it out and they’ll come in through our PLG funnel, our self-serve funnel. And there, how you sell to them and the message for them is extremely similar as the message to a solopreneur and SMB because they are the user, they have this actual direct pain of the product solves. And so I think that when, in a lot of ways that is consistent. Now, of course, if you’ve got that person in your funnel, right, who is the user within an enterprise,

Your job now is to use other channels to go and directly target the procurement team, the security team, the actual economic buyer with very targeted messaging. This is typically through a sales team. We can also be using things like account-based marketing to go do that so that you bring your enterprise value proposition to them. And this is classic in SaaS. This is why if you go to most SaaS websites, unless they are purely focused on the enterprise market,

the homepage will be very directed at the end user, and they will have an enterprise section which tells the full enterprise value proposition. And the price in the packaging, most of the packages are designed for the actual users, and they’ve got an enterprise package designed for those other people that you’re trying to sell to. I think it’s about, and finding the balance of that depends on your business and the degree to which it’s like your opportunities in the enterprise versus in the SMB.

John Jantsch (13:08.675)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (13:33.409)

So I think you needed to do both, but I think my key point there is that even in the enterprises, are where you’re to get the adoption is getting a end user to love it because they end up becoming what we call in the, in sort of go to market, the champion. They’re going in, Hey boss, we’ve got to use this thing. Here’s how much time it will save me. If you don’t get the champion, if you don’t get that user to care, the

John Jantsch (13:50.894)

Sure.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (13:59.883)

Procurement team, the security team, they don’t give a shit. Oops, sorry, shouldn’t have said it. They don’t care. And so I think that’s the key thing that I think oftentimes people miss.

John Jantsch (14:09.402)

So is part of what you’ve been brought to do is build a sales team or is there already a sales team that’s on the ground?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (14:17.457)

Yeah, we already had a sales team. when I joined, Cal and Lee had already gone on the journey to build an enterprise product offering an enterprise sort of package and team. think what I’m trying to do is blend the self-serve and sales experience in a more natural way. So again, a lesson that I’ve had at pretty much every single company I’ve worked for in B2B has had a combination of self-serve or product-led growth and sales led growth.

And typically speaking, they tend to be pretty siloed on islands. And so what happens is you either have this experience for the customer that’s fully self-serve, maybe a reactive support team, but pretty much self-serve. And then if you’re willing to buy the enterprise package, now you go through this like really human intensive experience. The SDR goes to the AE, goes to the account management team with implementation. And it’s like, it makes actually no sense if you think about it from first principles, why it would be such a

binary distinction between the two. And so I think a lot of companies are now realizing, you know, things like velocity sales or, you know, much more softer touch sales to still support the customer, but also get out of the way if they want to just like adopt and use. And so the team had already started to do some of that work, but it’s a lot of what I think about day in day out is how to blend the two in a more natural way.

John Jantsch (15:37.496)

Yeah.

Just get rid of a few of the acronyms, that would help, right? So have you found, and this may be a tough question for you to answer, you may not want to answer this, but have you found that the role that you’ve been brought into play is new and has that required a mindset shift because of the way the company’s grown, because of the company culture? Again, you don’t have to talk specifically about your experience as much as…

Shane Murphy-Reuter (15:45.353)

yeah.

John Jantsch (16:10.242)

I’m sure other companies have experienced those kind of growing pains too.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (16:14.465)

Yeah, it’s a great question. Like I think what a lot of companies are starting to realize is, and in my experience is that particularly technology companies are founded by technologists. And so a lot of the time they start self-serve, right? They go, well, we can just set up a signup link and people can just buy it. And then at some point a board member, somebody said, hey, you’ve got a bunch of larger customers here. You need to build an enterprise offering. They go and hire a head of sales from some enterprise company.

John Jantsch (16:25.612)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (16:42.591)

And that person brings a playbook and drops this like very classic sales experience on top of the self-serve base, creating this sort of siloed nature in this kind of like a, and so I think a lot of companies, there’s probably been about 10 years of evolution of that happening. A lot of companies have started to really feel the pain of those things being so disconnected. And so it is becoming more common.

John Jantsch (16:54.082)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (17:10.305)

to bring in a person running all of go-to-market, particularly in companies where they have both experiences in their business for all the reasons that I described because in the traditional model of having maybe a CMO who runs the self-serve side and a CRO or head of sales who runs the sales side, that traditional model actually beds in the fact that these two things are on a silo. And so…

John Jantsch (17:35.054)

Sure.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (17:37.205)

I do think that it’s increasingly happening that whether it’s they just use the term CRO, it’s your tone, all of it, or a president of GoToMarket like I am, a lot more companies are doing it now.

John Jantsch (17:50.982)

I’m going to get you in trouble here probably. But do you think that the way that salespeople are incentivized really actually exacerbates that problem?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (18:02.387)

It’s a really great question. actually remember listening to Bill Macias on a podcast who was the, he was head of CMO at Slack. I think he was at Zendesk, like kind of a goat in the industry. He talked about, I think it was at Slack bringing in for the sales team that part of their compensation was linked also to a customer satisfaction of the sales process. And so anyway, I just thought I’d share that. But yes, I do think that there is a, there is a.

I think in the more enterprise end of sales, having incentivization to ensure that, you know, the sales team do a good job of maximizing the revenue potential is important. So like, if I’m not incentivized, what I’ll do is I’ll say, yeah, okay, well, maybe I’ll maximize the discount that I give, or I’ll say, I won’t try and bother some multi-product sell. I’ll just say, just get them in and on this one product. And so in certain instances, you do want incentives for the sales team to

John Jantsch (18:50.968)

Yeah, yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (19:01.761)

push for the largest value sell as possible and incentivization around with commission structures, et cetera, can be important there. And so, for example, at Calendly, our enterprise sales team absolutely are commission-based and I think that’s the right approach. In a more velocity sales model that I mentioned before where it might be lighter touch, you’re semi-helping the customer like a support, right? You’re answering questions, you’re doing somewhat of a value sell but not the full thing.

you, you, do think that you want to be very careful not to have like a traditional model. And so for example, I currently, we don’t write their more salaries. And so I think you just need to apply the right incentive structure based on what, what are you trying to incentivize these people to do? And, and, and so I do think that there is a place for it as I mentioned, but maybe not across the board on a sales team.

John Jantsch (19:58.75)

All right. Let’s end today on a product question. I think this might be a record. think we’re 20 minutes in exactly. And I’m the first mention of AI. So how is AI going to impact the product from what you know so far?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (20:16.935)

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mentioned that we believe this is an opportunity to innovate in the relationship management software space for SMBs and solopreneurs, know, the smaller companies. One of the reasons that up until now, it’s been difficult to build this type of software for those customers is that typically those software types of software need like an army of operations people to set them up and manage them like

If you talk to companies, have Salesforce or Marketo or any of these, there’s like, there’s like job boards of like, you know, kind of, all these ops to manage these tools. And so if you’re at SMB, that’s really challenging, right? The beautiful thing is that we’re going to start entering the space just as AI is getting to the point where they can start automating a bunch of the, used to be, take a lot of operational, time and effort. And so.

John Jantsch (20:45.314)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (21:12.033)

You can imagine a world where like, you know, today, a CRM, even in most cases, still looks like one of these sort of like databases, right? Line items of people or whatever. Exactly. Right. And why does that exist? Because it was a record keeper. It was just a database, right? In the world of AI, that all happens automatically. Now a CRM or relation management software can be actually about surfacing the insights and actions of things that can truly lead to you creating better relationships. And so I think.

John Jantsch (21:18.722)

Yeah, it’s just a relational database, right?

John Jantsch (21:25.422)

the

Shane Murphy-Reuter (21:41.601)

I think it’s a beautiful time for any company that we start thinking about innovating into a new space because you have a blank sheet of paper to define the way you interact with this product in an AI first way, which I think the incumbents are going to really struggle with. And that’s why a lot of the incumbents are doing the co-pilot thing, right? We’ve got this chunky, hard to use software. So how we use AI will give you a clip.

John Jantsch (22:00.589)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:04.162)

Right.

button.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (22:10.517)

to help you to figure out how to use a really hard software. Well, the other way you could do it is actually design it from first principles in a way that’s really easy to use. And so anyway, we think that there’s a huge opportunity there. And for sure, our product roadmap from here is like AI first. And we are trying to think about everything from that lens.

John Jantsch (22:28.142)

Yeah.

Well, Shane, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d want to invite people to connect with you? I know obviously Calendly is where they can find out about the product, but anywhere you like to hang out?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (22:45.117)

LinkedIn is the best one. I used to be in other places, but I think we can safely point people to LinkedIn for now.

John Jantsch (22:51.692)

Yeah, awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (22:56.893)

Thanks so much, John. It was a pleasure.