John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, did you know that HubSpot’s annual inbound conference is coming up? That’s right. It’ll be in Boston from September 5th through the eighth. Every year inbound brings together leaders across business, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. You’ll be able to discover all the latest must know trends and tactics that you can actually put into place to scale your business in a sustainable way. You can learn from industry experts and be inspired by incredible spotlight talent. This year. The likes of Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Guy Raz are all going to make appearances. Visit inbound.com and get your ticket today. You won’t be sorry. This programming is guaranteed to inspire and recharge. That’s right. Go to inbound.com to get your ticket today.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Liam Martin. He’s the co-founder of Time Doctor and has been working remotely for over 20 years and has worked with thousands of companies looking to adopt a remote working model. Liam is incredibly passionate about understanding how organizations can unlock remote work to help achieve more autonomy for business owners and employees. Today we’re gonna talk about his newest book Running Remote: Master the Lessons From the World’s Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers. So Liam, welcome to the show.

Liam Martin (01:40): Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:42): So I’ll be the first to admit, when I saw the title of the book, I was like, oh yeah, a lot of companies are having to do distributed workforces and run remote today pretty clearly when we get into it, that’s, you’re not necessarily saying that’s how to go. You introduced the term asynchronous management as a mindset. So I’ll let, with that set up, I’ll let you explain what you mean by that.

Liam Martin (02:07): Sure. So when we went remote, just to kind of give you context, February of 2020 4% of the US workforce was working remotely by March of 2020. That was 45% of the US workforce. That is the biggest shift in work since the Industrial Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution took 80 years and we did that in March. So it was what I like to call emergency remote work, right? Everyone just said, well, let’s start working from home immediately and within days. And for someone who’s been doing this for 20 years, it was incredibly exciting to see the entire world shift over to my mindset. The thing that was problematic inside of that was that no one actually understood how to manage remote workers, right? And so now we’re seeing this pushback to the office because they don’t really fundamentally understand how to manage people effectively when they work remotely.

(02:59): And what I’ve been doing with Time Doctor and then also running remote, which is the largest conference on remote work that’s been running for the past six years, is I studied what successful remote companies do. And the one thing that they have in common, more than anything else, is something that I like to call asynchronous management, which is essentially, and it’s a very alien concept to a lot of people think about if you had to build a business but you couldn’t talk to anybody inside of that business, that’s essentially asynchronous management. And the book teaches you exactly how to do it.

John Jantsch (03:35): You know, it’s funny in a lot of ways, I think that people that get this, whether they even go into offices, get this mindset, it’s probably a better way to manage than most sort of top-down hierarchical . You know, organizations have always, you know, since the dawn of time managed, and I think a lot of people learn this as you mentioned, out of necessity and probably will never go back even if they start going back to the office. Would you say that’s a fair statement?

Liam Martin (04:03): Yeah, the data’s quite interesting. So we just actually had Brian Elliot from Future Forum that is the largest longitudinal data set on remote work. And one of the things that he’s seen recently is remote work hit and dependent upon the study that you look at, it can differ about 26% of the US workforce is currently working remotely, but that number is going back up. Sure. It’s not going down again. So we’ve actually gone past that Covid bump and we’re now going back up in terms of remote work. Also, 68% of new companies form today are actually stating that they want to be able to work remotely from the get-go. So I actually think that these new generation of companies are gonna be a lot more efficient. There’s a friend of mine who is the head of remote for a company called GitLab, and yet this great mindset connected to this, which was essentially asynchronous management is like the first model T rolling off the production line. And the old 20th century model are horses. You wanna be the Model T, you don’t wanna be the horse. Right, right,

John Jantsch (05:07): Right. You know, it’s funny, it’s a lot of industries like restaurants, you know, they were forced into doing things differently during Covid and they’ll never go back. Um, you know, now that they’ve learned that, and I think that it’s probably, aren’t we still in a bit of a window where actually remote workers have to learn how to work remote as well as remote managers or leadership? I mean, I think there’s a learning curve all around, isn’t there?

Liam Martin (05:30): Absolutely. So leadership executives, directors and above, they actually have adopted to remote work quite well. They actually are not going back to the office any anywhere near as much as middle managers. Middle managers are the real bulk of the problem in terms of adoption of remote work. 76% of employees want more remote work, 67% of managers, middle tier managers want less. So there’s a direct conflict between those two groups and it’s fundamentally that they just don’t understand how to manage those people the right way. And again, asynchronous management, it’s a little bit of an alien concept to be able to get your head around, but once you actually crystallize it, it becomes much easier to be able to manage people and scale. The other thing that I found really interesting when studying this book and studying a whole bunch of asynchronous organizations is that they on average had a managerial layer about 50% as much as on-premise in office counterparts. So therefore you can manage a lot more people with less managers.

John Jantsch (06:35): Sure. You, I mean, essentially Time Doctor is a tool, but you go to Great lengths to suggest that this mindset is not about the tools or at least first and foremost.

Liam Martin (06:46): Yeah, so I mean, time Doctor for us is really an asynchronous time management tool, which is the biggest thing that people are concerned about with regards to remote work is I don’t know what they’re doing. I know when they’re in the office they’re at least there and they’re doing something. Well, the reality is that they’re playing Candy Crush on their phones just under their desk just as much as they are when they work from home. It’s just that they get an extra hour and a half of sleep when they work from home . So they’re on average, more productive. There’s about 27 studies right now in the last year and a half that have come at about remote work productivity. 26 of them have stated that there’s an increase in productivity with regards to remote work. But yet we still see a massive pushback to the office. And again, when I push managers and really ask them the true reasons, it is we need to be able to make sure that those workers are accountable. We need to be able to measure their output. And there are ways of doing that time Doctor is not the only way of doing it. There’s a lot of other tools, particularly inside of asynchronous management to be able to make that happen.

John Jantsch (07:51): It’s interesting, I read a study that said, you know, when people went remote, there was a huge spike in in like tracking software and things. So, so it’s like they’re not in the office, I can’t see them. So I assume that they are not working at all unless I can like monitor them and watch them. Right. And I think that, as you said, what really proved out was people were actually far more productive. Probably, probably a percentage of them far happier in Absolutely. You know, because, hey, I got a five minute break, I’ll go throw the laundry in, you know, I’m getting something done, but you know, I’m gonna take a break at work, but now you know, I’m now I’m actually gonna do something for myself, you know, during that time. So I’m sure that we will see tons and tons of studies about mental health and happiness and whatnot related to work, but mm-hmm , is it true that there’s also a con to that? You know, not being in the office, there are people that miss inter, I hear it all the time, you know, I miss the interaction, I miss being with people, I miss having team moments. So how do you keep some of that alive?

Liam Martin (08:50): So there are ways of doing it and we outline it in the book, but there’s companies, like, as an example, they have a huge chat version of Dungeons and Dragons where all of a sudden you’ll get a push notification saying you’ve gotta go and heal your wizard, otherwise the dragon is gonna break down into the castle. You’ve got people that do offsites. So we do company retreats every single year. But the biggest thing that you have to think about is when you think about your social circle, it’s fundamentally around your work, particularly during your working years. Yeah. And one of the things that I find super confusing is we don’t have arranged marriages in North America, but we seem to have arranged friendships. It’s just these people that we happen to work with that are around us, become our social group. Well for me, I actually have a lot of neighbors that I talk to every single day. We have lunch three or four times a week just with the local people that I work with. I have a co-working space that I go down the street and those are really my like work social network. And for me that gives me much more happiness than if I’m necessarily interacting with direct coworkers.

John Jantsch (10:02): Let’s talk about communication rituals. I think that’s one of the ways that people have struggled the most with remote. I mean they had the like daily standup, you know, in the office and they had, you know, the weekly meeting and they had the 360 meeting. Is there a way that you have found a framework for, you know, how to communicate, how not to communicate? I mean the last thing we want is a whole bunch of more emails because we’re not in the office anymore, you know, from coworkers. So is there a framework for, you know, effective internal, particularly internal communication that you’ve found really benefits from remote?

Liam Martin (10:36): Yeah, well that’s a core piece of asynchronous management, which is fundamentally the platform is the manager, not necessarily the individual. So every single employee has a quantifiable and longitudinal number that they’re answerable towards. And ideally that number is actually provided by the platform, the project management system, the data points that you’re pulling in, it just is automatically presented. So the manager doesn’t necessarily have to sit down and say, Hey John, why aren’t you hitting your numbers? Well, it’s very clear that you’re not hitting your numbers. You don’t have to actually identify that. Then we can focus more on how to fix it as opposed to how to identify it.

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(12:38): So one of the things that asynchronous management probably begs people to do is make decisions on their own. Cuz I Yes. You know, I’m not gonna like go, Hey boss , you got a second? So I’m making decisions on my own. How do you equip people to make better decisions on their own?

Liam Martin (12:59): So we have a company value, which is self-guided muscle, which specifically works all of this stuff out. And fundamentally it is, don’t ask me what to do, tell me what you did. And if you have that type of mindset, you’re actually gonna work very well inside of remote companies. We have team members in 33 different countries all over the world and it’s very difficult for us to be able to communicate synchronously. Sure. I don’t know if you know this, John, but, uh, what do you think the average amount of video communication is in the average remote company that started in 2021? Cause it’s very different from 2020

John Jantsch (13:34): video communication. You mean like one-to-one loom video kinda

Liam Martin (13:38): Thing? Yes. So, so we’re talking Zoom. Oh, zoom everything. Yeah, Google Meet. We’re talking about all those types of video formats.

John Jantsch (13:45): I would say it’s probably five or six phone calls, five or six hours at this point a day. ,

Liam Martin (13:49): It’s about 56% of an employee’s workweek is spent on video communication. Yeah. Asynchronous organization’s spend at max 20%. Huh. So it’s a huge advantage where you’re kind of meeting to prepare yourself for work, but you’re not actually doing any work. Right? We’re discussing work, but we’re not actually getting work done. And the more that you can have autonomous individuals that can actually execute on what they need to execute on, the faster your organization will grow. Along with the platform being the manager. One of the other pieces which are a little bit more difficult for particularly founders to follow is we try to give everyone the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company. Hmm. And this is a very hard pill to swallow and it’s, it challenges us constantly. But if you give every single team member the same information as the CEO of the company, then magical things happen. They actually become way smarter overnight because they have the same information that you had in terms of being the founder of the CEO of the company. And they can make much better informed decisions about how to operate inside of the business.

John Jantsch (15:00): All right. The CEO knows the financials, the CEO knows what’s everybody’s paid. I mean, are we talking about that level of ?

Liam Martin (15:08): So the only thing that we hold back is how much employees are paid? Yeah. So we give our employees PNLs. We, they know who our customers are, they know what they’re making. We know everything and anything that goes on inside of the organization. And because we’re asynchronous and we document everything and everything is basically written in in the human, basically written down, the ability for us to actually jump in to all of those different virtual meetings that are asynchronous is very easy. So anyone can basically access anything anywhere.

John Jantsch (15:41): There’s been some discussion, I don’t know if it’s valid or not, but I’ve heard it, especially in larger organizations, that the, this remote work actually puts junior employees at a disadvantage. You know, they’re not interfacing with the SVPs anymore , or they don’t, you know, they’re, they can’t necessarily connect with a mentor at work that’s gonna help them kind of guide through the politics. Do you think there’s any credence to that idea?

Liam Martin (16:07): I think it’s pretty early to be able to say. So the first generation of remote work, we were able to take the creme de la creme of planet Earth and bring them into our companies. So we were really hiring the best people on planet Earth that wanted to be able to work remotely this next generation. Mm-hmm. , I agree. The data shows that it hasn’t really figured itself out yet, but I would say that there are ways of doing it. I mean, the mindset that we have is don’t focus so much on identifying where people are going, let the platform actually execute on the results. And then you deal with a lot of the EQ side of the bus of the business. How are you doing, John? What barriers are you currently having? How can I help you achieve those particular goals? That’s what you should be spending your management time on as opposed to whether or not you fill that your t i 83 report.

John Jantsch (17:00): So, so you have more than once talked about this asynchronous platform. So gimme a, like sketch that out for me. What does that look like? I get the concept and the mindset. What does it look like from a tangible aspect?

Liam Martin (17:14): Sure. So as every week I have something, which is our top executive meeting. All of our executives meet, we have it inside of Asana. We call it a SI silent meeting. So we have all of our metrics, we have our rocks that we need to achieve for that particular quarter. We have tasks that we need to achieve within the next week or two. And all of that is updated inside of Asana. And then we have issues and we write down all of our issues and we start to debate it. And sometimes these debates can go 5, 10, 20, 30 comments deep in terms of the discussion. But when we come to a conclusion, we take that conclusion, we add it to the top of the ticket and then we clear the ticket. And if we don’t have anything to say for that meeting, we don’t go to the meeting because we just saved every one 90 minutes of their lives. And we can see that the vast majority of technical issues don’t actually need to be addressed. The only ones that stay up on the agenda are the ones that really deal with people. It’s, John doesn’t like Liam for some particular reason and Liam is quite angry with John and we need to be able to settle it. That’s really the core issue that we, and the most synchronous forms of meetings are ironically HR and people meetings.

John Jantsch (18:30): Yeah. Yeah. Huh. So speaking of that one, uh, again, there’s certainly people out there are that are saying that remote work is really kind of devaluing culture inside of organizations. Obviously it’s a different culture. , how do you keep, let’s say you have a very rich culture. People loved working at this organization. Now we’ve all gone, you know, remote. How do you keep aspects of maybe an old but cherished culture alive when a lot of the ways that people did that go away?

Liam Martin (19:03): So I think that people really need to understand what is culture to them. And the way that I see culture at its nucleus is a mission. Yeah. So our mission as a company is we’re trying to empower the world’s transition towards remote work. We’ve been doing that for almost 15 years and we want to continue doing it. And if anyone doesn’t align to that culture, we move them outta the organization as quickly as possible. So it’s not so much who you work with. So a lot of people confuse who you work with, your culture. It’s not about whether you get a birthday cake on your birthday or whether there’s pizza Thursdays or there’s nap rooms in your office. This doesn’t matter. It is, do you care about what you’re doing as a company? Are you excited about actually accomplishing that mission? If you’re not, don’t work there. . And if your company doesn’t have an exciting mission, don’t even start. It’s just fundamentally something that people really miss. And for us, I mean we’ve have a, we have a 98% retention rate inside of our organization because we have a very clear mission and values that connect to that core piece, which is people are really excited about helping people work remotely. And whatever that is for you, you need to be able to reinforce that and reinforce it much more when you are working remotely.

John Jantsch (20:23): So, so you probably went a little bit down answering this question. When people, particularly people that haven’t done it before and they’re like, yeah, we’re gonna go to this. Where do they generally get it wrong?

Liam Martin (20:35): So there was a chapter that was removed from the book, which is, was very frustrating on my part. I actually wanted to publish it, but the publisher said we shouldn’t, I ran 20 K studies. So I worked with 20 companies to try to make them asynchronous. And three of them became asynchronous by my definition, which was less than 20% of their work week spent on synchronous activities. Seven reduced the amount of synchronous time that they had, but 10 increased the amount of synchronous time that they spent inside of their organizations. And it really boiled down to three key factors. Number one, you need full buy-in, not just from the founders of the CEO of the company. You need the entire executive team and more importantly the directors and managers below that particular team. If there’s a chink in that particular armor, it’s going to fall apart.

(21:30): Second is you need to be able to build out process documentation. And we have, we basically connected to platform as the manager is when someone has a question like what are the HR policies inside of the organization? Well, we redirect them towards the document that actually explains that instead of me sitting down and talking to you for 30 minutes. And then the third thing is, all of this documentation exists, but very few people can actually query it in a meaningful way. So we identified that over 95% of these process documents, once they actually got them written in, the people that failed, they never looked at them ever again. Right. . So they actually needed to use them. They had built this huge infrastructure and they never started to actually use it. So there’s a huge, there’s a huge software opportunity there actually for someone to be, I’m sure there’s gonna be a ChatGPT add-on where you can just magically get that information and put it in front of you. Course. But those are the three key issues that have a problem. Yeah,

John Jantsch (22:31): Yeah. And of course what that’s that application will do is it will also tell you in real time, here’s the things people are having the most problems with . But you know, find Absolutely. And it’s like, here, we need to like redo this or we need to, you know, make this better or more prominent. So for sure. So I want to end just on, on the thought about, you know, UN management, a whole new leadership style. Is this something that is going to need to be taught and built into, you know, leadership training? Or is this just really gonna be something where it becomes an organizational mission and everybody buys in or they don’t?

Liam Martin (23:07): I think what’s happening right now is, as I said before, at the top of our call, 68% of new companies that are in tech at least Yeah. Are starting remote, right? And they’re adopting an asynchronous management model as their core operating system. And so I do see a lot of resistance inside of corporate America to be able to adjust to this particular model. I would say in the next five to 10 years, when those companies, those little companies become big companies, they’re going to recognize we’ve been caught with our tail between our legs because we’re dealing with an organization that can scale a speed that is at this point incalculable to the average corporate America company. And so I think that’s essentially gonna figure itself out. And then it’s probably gonna work into the MBA programs, you know, 10, 15 years down the

John Jantsch (24:00): Line, be seen as a case study for, you know, competitive regions if nothing else. There’s

Liam Martin (24:06): Actually a lot of H B R articles specifically on asynchronous management and how successful it is. And yet no one actually wants to implement it at scale and most of the adoption is happening in the tech startup space. Sure, sure. But I think that will change very soon.

John Jantsch (24:22): Yeah. And I think it’s probably just sort of counterintuitive is part of the problem. Absolutely. You know, it’s like absolutely your silent meeting, I mean, that would freak a lot of people out because it just seems, you know, so counter to what you know, everybody’s been, you know, raised to believe is, especially in executive over 50, I mean it’s . I hate to, well

Liam Martin (24:39): The other piece,

John Jantsch (24:40): I can see that because I’m in that category, but ,

Liam Martin (24:44): The other part that’s really interesting is charisma bias disappears. So the vast majority of people that have existed in the 20th century management model, they’re incredibly charismatic people. You wouldn’t be running this podcast if you weren’t an incredibly charismatic individual. So you’re the person that controls the conversation. The ability for you to communicate synchronously allows for your ideas to be adopted much more often than others. But are your ideas better or are you just better at delivering them? And asynchronous management allows for everyone to have equal access, including the wallflowers that don’t necessarily want to be able to compete Yeah. With the char charismatic people, but they now can have a shot with asynchronously.

John Jantsch (25:26): Yeah. Actually, a leadership skill that I’ve had to learn is keep my mouth shut. So you’re D , you’re dead on that one. Exactly. Well Liam, thanks so much for stopping by. To take a few minutes to share some ideas with our listeners, you wanna tell people where they can connect with you and possibly pick up a copy of running remote,

Liam Martin (25:42): So @liamremote on most social media. And if you want to go pick up a copy, best place is Amazon and next best place is runningremote.com, which is also where we have our conference if you wanna have access to all of our previous videos and talks from the last six years.

John Jantsch (26:02): Awesome. Well again, appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Liam Martin (26:08): Thanks for having

John Jantsch (26:09): Me. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, did you know that HubSpot’s annual inbound conference is coming up? That’s right. It’ll be in Boston from September 5th through the eighth. Every year inbound brings together leaders across business, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. You’ll be able to discover all the latest must know trends and tactics that you can actually put into place to scale your business in a sustainable way. You can learn from industry experts and be inspired by incredible spotlight talent. This year. The likes of Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Guy Raz are all going to make appearances. Visit inbound.com and get your ticket today. You won’t be sorry. This programming is guaranteed to inspire and recharge. That’s right. Go to inbound.com to get your ticket today.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Tiffani Bova. She is a global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue producing divisions at businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. She’s also hosts the podcast called What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova. But today we’re gonna talk primarily about her latest book, The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth. So welcome to the show Tiffani.

Tiffani Bova (01:41): Thank you for having me, John. I’m thrilled to be here.

John Jantsch (01:44): So when people talk about experience and growth, I think today they quite naturally think about customer experience because marketers are very, very attuned to that idea. But you actually take the emphasis on customer experience to task a little bit and kind of say that focus is actually contributing to what we’ve talked about lately, the great resignation, quite quitting and all those other things. So tell me, uh, let’s hear your thoughts on how you feel that emphasis on customer is taking away from the employee experience.

Tiffani Bova (02:17): Well, let me answer that with a little bit of history because I think especially with an audience that our marketers right, have been doing this for a long time. I need to set a little bit of context. So as was mentioned, John, I’ve been at Salesforce a little more than seven years, but prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner for a decade covering sales transformation, the impact of digital to the way brands market and engage with customers and really looking forward around the role of, if you will, experience in the way brands compete. So I was part of the team that made the prediction that the Chief Marketing Officer would spend more on technology than the chief information officer. And we did that all the way back in 2008 and we said it, everyone went, you know, absolutely no way not gonna happen.

(03:03): But you know, sap, Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce all went out and bought marketing technology companies, right? The stack to get access to that budget. But we didn’t say that because of the fact we thought marketers needed to be spending money on technology. And by the way, this wasn’t about like online marketing, right? Or SEO optimization. This really was buying the stack. They were having their own UI designers, developers, they were getting their own infrastructure. I mean, it was a big investment. We really believed that customer experience was gonna be the next battleground. Now, you know, in 2023, people are going, well, you know, that’s nothing new like Tiffani, like we’ve been doing this a while, but remember this was 2008. Yep. And it was, you know, we actually then advocated for the Chief Marketing Officer to get a seat at the executive table really around this experience.

(03:51): Do we create a new role? The chief customer officer, the chief customer experience officer, whatever you wanna call it, we were kind of in the thick of it trying to figure out how and where does this play? And it was kind of this, right? Your customers, your true north, you know, live and die on the hill of your customer. It’s, we’re customer centric. We’re the most customer obsessed company on the planet. Mm-hmm. , however you wanna say it. But along the way, what we did was we spent billions of dollars reducing the effort of the customer in to do business with us in order to increase their experience they had with us. Right? From, you know, when I first stood up, my very first e-commerce site literally was in 2001 , I was Eloqua or Eloqua’s beta client and constant contacts beta client. So I’ve been kind of on this journey for a minute and I will tell you that it was 10 clicks to buy something. Now it’s one click or one voice. We’ve made it really easy. But the intended or unintended consequence of all that investment in customer is we’ve left the employee behind.

John Jantsch (04:56): Yeah. You could maybe even say that. Making it easier for the customer came at the expense of making it harder for the employee to serve the customer in some cases .

Tiffani Bova (05:06): Well, yeah. So, you know, let’s just take, let’s just take customer as an example, right? We’ve moved from trying to make call centers a cost center to make it more of a revenue generation engine, right? So we have sales ops, we have, you know, marketing collaboration with sales, we have sales qualified leads. But does marketing enablement sales enablement also get leveraged in the call center? Or does the marketing team really focus on the connection with the sales team and don’t do the same level of enablement? Sure. Into the call center organization as an example, right, right, right. So now a customer calls in and I have a question and the call center agent is like working through the script. They don’t know about a promo that marketing has just done online. You know, they don’t know which products to upsell and cross-sell or what’s the best for customer. They’re not able to have access into the data of what the customer actually bought from us, you know, or bought from them. Like, you know, whatever the case might be. So then the call center agent is completely ill-equipped and what’s the result of that? A bad customer experience. And most marketers are responsible for net promoter score and customer satisfaction in many ways. So if your frontline team doesn’t have what they need, it shows itself in those experience metrics on the customer side.

John Jantsch (06:25): So it would seem pretty logical. I mean if you think about it, I mean most companies, the customer interaction is with their employees with frontline employees in many cases. So it seemed pretty logical. Happy employees make happy customers, but not that many people invest in something that seems awfully logical. Although I will say there are companies that are really good at it.

Tiffani Bova (06:47): Yeah, and I would totally agree with you. Look, I’m not the first to come up with this concept by any stretch. Herb Kelleher did it. Richard Branson has done it. I mean, there’s a lot of people that understood, but when you hold up best in class customer experience companies, isn’t it interesting that it tends to be those that are also really good on an employee? Yeah, they could. That you could argue, just because you’re really good on customer doesn’t mean you’re great on employee. Who is the most customer obsessed brand according to their mission statement on the planet. John, who is that?

John Jantsch (07:18): I, customer obsessed brand? I don’t know, apple

Tiffani Bova (07:22): . So starts with an A, the other one starts with an A. So that was the mantra. That was sort of what Bezos said, right? He was like, we are going to be the most customer obsessed company on the planet. You could argue that are their employees as happy as us as customers? Yeah. Well you could argue, maybe that’s not the case, right? Or you could say Starbucks really happy customers, less happy customers back to happy customers, but now not so happy employees. So just because you’re hitting on one cylinder doesn’t mean you’re hitting on both. So I was standing on stage and I made, I made this comment, I didn’t think it was a coincidence that Salesforce was a great place to work, you know, pretty much globally, one of the most innovative companies in the world, in the fastest growing enterprise software company.

(08:02): So I went to our C M O at the time and I said, I’d like to prove that out. So we did a study with Forbes Insight and we went to publicly traded companies in the US and we mapped it out. We looked at net promoter scores, CSAT scores, attrition rates, right? Best places to work, you know, Glassdoor ratings, great place to work ratings, like whatever it was, right? Everything we could get our hands on. Growth rates, churn rates. So all publicly a avail publicly traded for this obvious reason, cuz it was publicly available information. Lo and behold, what we found when we mapped it out on a two by two was those brands that were really good on both accesses customer and employee, had a 1.8 times faster growth rate than those that did not. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a 40 million impact.

(08:42): If you’re $5 million brand or a $1 million brand, you could do the math. So it was interesting, but what we didn’t then know was what are the attributes, right? Of the employee experience that have the greatest impact on customer? And in just full transparency, a little caveat here, a little asterisk, I am not an HR expert, I’m not a people or talent expert. This book, the experience mindset is about the intersection of those moments that matter when an employee touches a customer. So that’s what I’m talking about, right? Then what were those aspects of the employee day-to-day that had the greatest impact on improving cx? And that’s what we honed in on the second study, which was a global study across almost a year’s worth of time. And then, and through that we were able to find sort of the key areas needed for improvement. And then we did a third one in retail, specifically a that a brand that has a thousand outlets, retail storefronts in the us. I don’t know who it is. So I couldn’t tell you even if I had that information, is that those company that, that those storefronts that did really well on the employee side saw a 55 0% increase in revenue per hour per head for store employee five zero. So, you know, they used to generate $42 an hour, you know, and now they’re gen generating 85, 86, 80 $7 an hour. So significant

John Jantsch (10:06): H how much of that, what we’re talking about today, would you say is just leadership or is maybe just culture?

Tiffani Bova (10:13): So I, I’d say this, what we did was we asked the C-suite and we asked employees obviously a series of questions, but then we outlined sort of the top seven or eight areas that were the greatest challenges to growth on the employee side. Tied for number one was team members were leaving too often. So it’s disruptive to sure, resiliency, flow, collaboration, right? The other tied for number one was outdated technology. On the C-suite side, it was number six. So that was the largest disconnection between what the C-suite thought and what the employees thought was outdated tech. So then we said, well, hold on a second, let’s like, right, let’s double click, what does that mean? So 54% of the C-suite, once again globally, and it varied by region, felt that the technology they were providing was effective for them to do their job. Only 32% of employees agreed, like all up employees, only 23% of customer facing employees agreed that they had the right tech to collaborate effectively, do their job efficiently, you know, be very productive and achieve the goals of the organization. So we are greatly failing , our customer facing employees to the tune of, you know, 77, 70 8% of ’em aren’t happy with the technology they’re using to do their

John Jantsch (11:37): Jobs. Well, I’ve actually seen a lot of research on employees ranking, like what’s the most important attributes of their job? And like salary is below what you just mentioned. Do I have the tools to do my job? , you know, shows up higher than like, am I well paid?

Tiffani Bova (11:50): Well, yeah. So let’s just take it from a marketing perspective, right? A marketer sends a sales qualified lead over to the sales team. Okay, well first and foremost, do they even agree on what a defined qualified lead is? Sure. Right.

John Jantsch (12:03): Start there. Now I can say no

Tiffani Bova (12:05): . Yes. Pretty emphatic. No. Right? Sellers are like, it’s ready to close , right? Marketers are, it’s warm. And I’ve run both sales and marketing and I’ve argued with myself about this. So, you know, it’s a, the struggle is real. Next marketing is using one technology system, sales is using something else. So they might give it to ’em in something that then the salesperson has to enter that information into the CRM system, then they’re working that lead, right? And then they need to go and now they’re gonna send a white paper or they’re gonna send a video link, but they have to go to another system in order to grab that content, right? To draft that communication and send it out. And then what tracks the click through rates and download rates is another application. And then marketing goes back and has this, you know, feedback loop, which is not automated and then has to go as sales.

(12:52): And we could go on and on. Only 28% of a salesperson’s time is spent selling and half of them will misquote. So if we’re not giving ’em enough time to sell, it’s in the systems and processes, not necessarily the tech. I mean, I’m not saying technology doesn’t have room for improvement. Obviously I work at Salesforce, it’s not lost on me, but technologically we just don’t have a problem. Technology can do pretty much anything we’d like it to do. On the marketing and sales side, it’s the people and process side. Going back to your comment a few minutes ago, people culture, like are you willing to do the work that you need to, if you’ve journey mapped the customer, which you would do in marketing? Have you journey mapped what the employee has to do for the customer, what they want you to do, right? And these are the kinds of things that are very mindset focused, right? Where if you’re gonna do something for the customer, what is the intended or unintended consequence for your employees?

John Jantsch (13:46): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. Marketing Made Simple. It’s a podcast hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. In a recent episode, JJ and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use ChatGPT for marketing purposes. We all know how important that is today. Listen to marketing made simple. Wherever you get your podcasts

(14:22): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(15:10): Where does employer branding fit into this equation for you? You know, as a marketer, primarily I have seen companies that have great employee experiences. It’s a great place to work, have kind of pivoted to the fact that let’s tell the market what a great place this is to work. Because frankly, that’s a good marketing message as well. So how does that fit into the conversation of employee experience?

Tiffani Bova (15:34): Yeah. On another study, not as part of this research that I did, we had one again from Salesforce called the Connected Customer. And it actually asked customers when deciding on a brand what’s important to the customer. And it wasn’t just like, you know, was the product or service, great. 88% of ’em said the experience they provide is as important as the products and services they sell. So experience matters, which to anybody listening to this particular podcast, you’re gonna go, yeah, tell me something I don’t know. Right? That’s, we know that, right? But what else also it said was how do you treat your employees? How do you treat the planet? Yeah. Like what’s your stance on things? You know, it is now broader sort of the role of brand in decision making. Especially when you’re not talking about a high dollar value item, not a transactional, like, you know, I’m buying toilet paper.

(16:25): You know, you may actually say, hold on a second. Like is it recyclable? You know, the inside, right? Is the paper bamboo? Is it, what are we cutting down 10 million trees? You know, you may care about that and then you may choose to use a different brand. So consumers are, and B2B and B2C are starting to make decisions beyond the normal brand. Is the product and service good? Is the price fair? Right? It’s now these other things. So I would say to you how companies treat their employees. So what we saw over Covid, right? Getting fired over Zoom or you know, we’ve seen all the videos, right? We’re make big faux PAs, then you’ve got a pipeline of open roles. Does someone wanna go work for a leader like that? , right? You’ve just totally hurt your ability to retain and attract talent. Yeah. Or people going, I’m gonna leave, like I don’t wanna work here. Right? And then that gets disruptive to what we were just talking a few minutes ago.

John Jantsch (17:17): So let’s throw another wrench in there. I mean, what is all the remote work from home, you know, done to even, you know, this concept of employee, I mean, it’s really changed what the experience the employee has dramatically in a company and certainly changed the way in which communication happens and leadership happens and the way you even interact with employees. So how has that made an a greater challenge?

Tiffani Bova (17:43): Yeah, and it’s a great question because I think what we’ve definitely learned over the last two and a half years is it’s, oh, everything is gonna go remote. Everyone is gonna work remote, right? Like, we’re never gonna go back to the office and we’ve seen, right? That isn’t necessarily good either, right? Mm-hmm , you lose the collaboration, you lose teaming, right? You lose that happenstance conversation. All the things we know, right? Yeah. And also just mental health and wellbeing and all those things. It’s a complex question. I don’t like the top down time to come back to the office. I don’t like the top down time to stay home. , I like the, hold on a second. Like by team, by group, you may have, listen, there are lots of people in the corporate world who never worked from home during all this because they had to be in the office because it was mission critical to, you know, keeping the systems up and running or whatever it might be.

(18:32): Yeah. So, you know, and or you had salespeople who were always in the field and not in the office, right? So like, I haven’t worked from an office in 17 years, like long before pandemic, right? Right. And so, but I think that there is value in saying for our particular team, you know, one week a month we’re all coming in, that’s when we’re gonna do our this and that, and then let people go and do their work if they wanna come in and schedule it. But during this time, we are all going to be in the office. And that makes sense to someone to go, okay, I get it. I know why it’s not a blanket mandate and it keeps me connected, especially for the generation that has never worked in an office, never had the opportunity to create these relationships. Getting that FaceTime is critical to the long-term understanding of what it means to be a leader, be part of a team, you know, launch a product and execute on that. Those things are the subtleties that we’ve all had at our fingertips by working in an office for so long.

John Jantsch (19:29): . Yeah. The blanket bandaid unfortunately just says we don’t trust you.

Tiffani Bova (19:33): . Oh, well that’s, I listened. You know, so I actually say it in the book, it’s like what we were just talking about, the investments we made technically in customer experience versus the investments we made in employee experience, right? Pandemic hits. Yeah. People, many are forced to go and work from home. And one of the very first things many organizations did was they went out and purchased employee tracking software, right? , it was like a 4000% increase in sales, right? And some call center agents were having to leave their cameras on all the time. And not everybody has the luxury of having a private room by which they can work from and do video from. It might be their bedroom, it might be their kitchen, it might be their kids’ room. I mean, you know, we don’t all have the luxury of having a, you know, carved out space where we can work. So that just said, I trusted you last week, , I don’t trust you anymore. Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:28): All right. So if I’m listening to this and I’m a company that thinks, oh gosh, yeah, we really have gone too all in customer service. We need to turn this around like words. What’s the first act? Where’s the first place to look? Uh, again, so many employee initiatives come off as like, oh, I just read this new book and here’s the new way. You know, how, how do you actually bring this to light in a meaningful way without it just being an overreaction?

Tiffani Bova (20:53): Yeah. So you know, as I started this conversation out, giving a little context of, you know, really advocating for their, becoming a role for a customer, you know, in the C M O. Yeah. To have this conversation around experience. In this particular case, I am not advocating for a new C-suite role. Chief Employee Experience officer. Yeah. That’s why I called it mindset. That’s why I called it experience mindset. My ask would be the next time you do or say something on behalf of the customer, like I’ve got a customer advisory board. Great. Do you have an employee advisory board? And I don’t mean an E R G, I mean an employee advisory board that might talk about some of the things we’ve talked about. What are the systems and processes and integration and collaboration tools they’re using to do their job? Are they working right?

(21:36): Like if you’re doing nps, are you doing E NPSs? If you’re doing customer sat, are you doing employee sat? If you’re doing customer effort scores, are you doing employee effort scores? Have you journey mapped the customer buyer journey? Okay, we’ll have you journey mapped the employee’s role in making that buyer journey seamless and frictionless in all the words we buzz around on. So I’d say to you that this is not, this is an aircraft carrier subject, but right now it’s kind of a speed bone of activities, right? It is a manner by which you can say, what are the things that we are tracking in CX and do we have a correlating ex?

John Jantsch (22:16): Yeah. That when that actually should be easy, right? Because you’ve already got supposedly a roadmap. Yeah.

Tiffani Bova (22:21): Right? And that’s where it can start with just mirroring what you have for customer, for employee. That is going to tell you a whole lot of things you don’t know.

John Jantsch (22:31): Yeah. Well, Tiffani, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to, where would you like to invite people to connect with you and obviously pick up a copy of the Experience Mindset?

Tiffani Bova (22:42): Well, you can get The Experience Mindset wherever you buy books. It’s in Audible and ebook, so whichever format you would like. And you can follow me on social media. I’m very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and less so on Facebook. But I am there. But you know, I’m always looking for feedback. If you work for a company that’s gotten this right or things you’ve learned along the way, those are those amazing nuggets that I love to hear. So please share them with me. But thank you, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (23:07): Awesome. Well, again, thank you for taking time out of your day and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

(23:12): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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(01:04): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mary Sheehan. She’s an accomplished product marketing leader with deep experience held marketing leadership roles at Adobe, Google, Google, you know who I’m talking about, and many startups. She is also the co-creator of a new course with Reforge and hosts, the popular Women in Product Marketing podcast. And we’re gonna talk about her new book today, the Pocket Guide to Product Launches: Get Confident, Go to Market and Win. So Mary, welcome to the show.

Mary Sheehan (01:40): Thanks, John. So good to be here.

John Jantsch (01:42): So let’s give the listeners a little bit of context for why you’re qualified to write a book about product launches. Tell me a little bit about your product launch history, maybe like your greatest hit or anything you wanna share.

Mary Sheehan (01:54): Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a great question. So I have done product marketing, which is really known for product launches for about 15 years now. Run over 250 launches and I’ve done product launches at companies like Google and Adobe, and several startups that you mentioned, as well as in a lot of consulting for series A and series B companies. So yeah, I’ve launched a lot of advertising technology products in my day and recently I joined the Adobe Lightroom product marketing team leading that up. And we just had a big launch for a product called Dinos with that. So yes, I’ve done a lot of launches in the B2B and consumer space, so thought I’d write a book, .

John Jantsch (02:36): Okay, so awesome. So let’s start off on the negative. Where do people get this wrong?

Mary Sheehan (02:40): ? Oh boy. Yeah, well launches, there is a whole section on where you can go wrong and what you can do about it, right? But I think the biggest challenge is actually getting the timing right. So especially when you’re working at a tech company, often there are cultural differences between the product and edge team and the marketing team. And in order to get those humming together in perfect alignment, it’s quite an undertaking. So I think that is a really hard part about just figuring out when you’re gonna launch, sticking to the timeline so you can make the biggest impact. That’s what I see as a big challenge.

John Jantsch (03:15): Who knew? Who knew timing was a cultural issue? . So we’ll revisit that again. So what, I guess why, you know, what compelled you other than you’ve got this deep experience and you wanted to share it. I mean, is there something that wasn’t being said in the product launch space that you really wanted to get into this book?

Mary Sheehan (03:36): Yeah, so at the time when I started writing this, I really felt like product marketing was kind of this learn on the job type type of mentality. There wasn’t a lot of content out there about product marketing. So after leading a team for the very first time, I realized, wow, if they didn’t have a Mary to share this experience, they would’ve been creating things, you know, from scratch, really reinventing the wheel. So I saw a real market need that, you know, hey, people are trying to run their first product launch, whether you’re a product marketer, a product manager, or founder of a small business, why not just make it easy and give you the templates and everything to get started? And so the idea of this book is really kind of modeled after a Harvard Business Review guide where you can just take it in a weekend or in a few hours and also have a bunch of templates so you can get started. I just felt really felt like with a, with the right tools and frameworks, you can do this and it can be a lot easier than just trying to figure it out on your own.

John Jantsch (04:33): So when people think products, they think, you know, physical box, you know, prototype. But what about information products? I mean a lot of people launch things that are not, you know, tangible physical things. I mean, would the framework, does the framework still apply kind of to any type of launch?

Mary Sheehan (04:50): It applies to any type of launch, yes. And a lot of my experience is not with the, you know, not with something you can hold in your hand. It’s a technology that you’re reading about. Yeah. Or even something like a white paper or an ebook. So this can really work for anything that you are launching.

John Jantsch (05:10): Why don’t we start with, and we can maybe get into a couple of different, but kind of quickly, like what are the sections, you know, what are the steps involved in? It’s like first you do this, then you do this, kind of maybe give us the outline.

Mary Sheehan (05:22): Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that I like to do is just get the plan. You know, get everything in order, you know, look at the checklist, look at the things that you need to accomplish. And the first piece of that plan to really fill in is around strategic readiness. So no matter what your product is, you really need to understand who you are launching to, what your target market really is, and really understand that audience really well. You need to align the team that’s helping you. Maybe it’s just you, but aligning anyone that’s gonna help you with any content creation and set some goals. You know, I really think that without goal setting, you’re really not, what’s the point of what you’re doing and what’s the point of what you’re launching? So after that, creating a plan and strategic readiness section, it’s about thinking about how you are actually going to bring this to market with the positioning and messaging as well as what we call the channels that you are going to be marketing to and making sure that really aligns back to your customers, your target customers. And then finally just executing it, getting that timing right and getting that message really out there.

John Jantsch (06:24): So maybe this, maybe you’re gonna say, well that’s not really a part of the launch, but what about actually getting the product right? , which is probably goes before the launching, but certainly has implications, right, ?

Mary Sheehan (06:38): Yeah, absolutely. So no, I do think in the role of product marketing, it’s really important to make sure that you have the right product. And actually one of the questions I ask up front in the book is, should you be launching this? Are you ready? Do you solve a problem? What is your financial target and model for this? So I do think that there is, you know, a huge effort that goes into the beginning of this, whether, and sometimes launching is actually about launching, so you can test and get that feedback. So you might launch something as an alpha or an mvp, minimum viable product. So you can really understand that.

John Jantsch (07:14): Yeah, so I, I have launched many products myself, they’ve all been information products, courses, things like that. Cool. And I’ve had some real winners and some real losers. And one of the things years ago I learned that if I actually developed my product with my customers, like do you really want this? Does this make sense? , does this solve a problem? What, you know, what role does a customer, you know, existing customer base play? I mean, how involved should they be in just what you said? Is there really in for this?

Mary Sheehan (07:45): Oh, 100% agree with that. And I, if I look back on any of my launch fails, it’s totally been that we’ve either missed the mark on their customer or we moved so fast that we just left them in the dust and didn’t think about it. So I totally agree with that. And so I do think that there should be a really considerable effort in understanding if this product has product market fit. And you do that by talking to customers, by understanding, you know, if this is something that they would actually buy and use, getting them to really invest in user testing. You know, is this something, you know, what is it about the experience that you’re bringing them in on? Is there anything confusing about it? So yeah, one chapter is actually all about getting to know your customer and scrappy ways that you can research and connect with them so you can make sure that you’re not only launching the right product, but talking about it in the right way too.

John Jantsch (08:33): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor, Marketing Made Simple. It’s a podcast hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work In an a recent JJ and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use ChatGPT for marketing purposes. We all know how important that is today. Listen to marketing Made simple. Wherever you get your podcasts

(09:11): Hey marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part, you can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(09:57): So one of the dangers in that sometimes is they don’t know, you know, what their prob, you know how to that this is gonna solve a problem or what their problem actually is. You know, the cliche comment, you know, Henry Ford said, if I ask people what they wanted, they said a faster horse. So , how do you know, how do you bring innovative things to market that people don’t know they need yet?

Mary Sheehan (10:20): Yeah, that’s such a good question and I think that we’re coming up against this really with Gen AI. You know, it’s so many things that are out here that weren’t here six months ago. Like I would never have known I needed text to edit to get these beautiful images. So I think prototyping in kind of early phases is so important. And what I think is even more important though, is understanding what their challenges are, right? And so they might not be able to articulate to you what they want in terms of a new product, but they can tell you what their pain points are. So you can watch their user workflows, you can actually go, you know, see them where they are and see, you know, whatever type of product it is, if it’s at the consumer space, go to their house, see how they’re actually doing different things, what they’re eating, how they’re cooking, or you know, in the tech space, how they’re using their technology. Are they using it on their phone? Are they using it on their desktop? So understanding their challenges I think can be a way better way to actually say, okay, this is a need. They don’t know what will fix this necessarily or they’re doing this crazy work around. But we do understand that’s a core challenge that we can solve.

John Jantsch (11:20): Yeah, I, I love to tell people nobody wants what we sell. They want the problem solved. . Exactly. If those, if you could connect those two, they’re great, but otherwise, you know, they don’t want it. What if I get it wrong? Unfortunately, I can’t think of a great example right now. Maybe you can in your history, but of people that went out and said, here it is, blah, blah, blah, and the market said, well I don’t get it, or that’s, I don’t need that, but I need this. And they pivot. So with the actual product, I mean, any thoughts on, you know, how to, you know, to maybe even build that in like that could be a possibility. Know how would you address that?

Mary Sheehan (11:55): Yeah, oh, and I always say, if you haven’t had a major launch fail, you probably haven’t been doing it long enough , so even right, right. Best plans you’re gonna, that’s gonna happen. So I would say fail fast. I mean, admit it, you know, and I think what, this is what’s so important, like I mentioned about goal setting, having those goals and starting to track that so you’re not just, you know, launching it and saying, okay, great pop the champagne, we’re done here. Really tracking and seeing if you’re hitting those metrics and if you’re not, what is going wrong? And really trying to identify that so quickly. So one, one launch fail example I had was, um, we went to market with a product, had tested it with this user group. It was amazing feedback. And when we went to market, we actually realized no one was buying it because we’d only been talking to the users, not the decision maker. And it did not fit into the decision maker’s stack at all. So, you know, it took us a little bit of time to figure that out. But once we did, we basically pulled it and decided we needed to go a totally different track and it morphed into something else that, you know, our actual buyer would purchase as part of their marketing set. Yeah. So a admit it, move on, figure out how to fix it, and sometimes that’s maybe repositioning or you know, it could be in any number of things that you need to fix.

John Jantsch (13:09): Yeah. And one of the things you, and this is probably particularly true of smaller organizations, you know, it’s a lot of times I think larger organizations have their goals all mapped out and they have like , you know, what’s next and what’s next. But I think the point you make there is launch is just the beginning in some ways and not the end, but it sort of implies that. But the, you know, some of the biggest gains that I’ve experienced is to actually pay attention to not only who is buying, but how they were using it and then what they needed next. And it really, you know, and of course I’d already sold to them, so selling them more was gonna be even easier. So, you know, you kind of alluded to that, but it’s not just metrics of like, is this selling or not? It’s how do you build onto it?

Mary Sheehan (13:53): Yeah, absolutely. I think tracking sentiment, how they’re using it, what they, you can improve on, how you can iterate from here is great to be able to kind of map that in as part of your process. Yeah, I kind of think about the product launch process. It’s on the cover of my book, it’s a mountain , the at the peak is the launch, but on the other side you’re descending down that mountain, but there’s still a lot of work to be done and a lot of things to really figure out until you, you maybe find that idea for the next launch.

John Jantsch (14:19): Well, and to carry that metaphor a little farther, I live in the mountains and you know, one of the things that happens when you climb, a lot of times you’re like, oh, there’s the top. And then you get close and it’s like, oh, that was a false peak , there’s a much higher climb, you know, to continue. And I think a l I, that’s how I use that metaphor all the time for business. Cuz you know, j just when you think you’ve made, it’s like, oh no, there’s, you know, there’s the next peak. Yeah. Or the real peak.

Mary Sheehan (14:42): Yes. My wallpaper here shows that as .

John Jantsch (14:45): Yeah. So, so you said that this was in some ways the, when I asked you about how, you know how to get this wrong, you said timing and team and you have a whole section on that, although it’s the last section, but talk a little bit about the timing aspect and what you mean by that. Because it’s not just like, oh, fourth quarter is the best time to launch. I mean it’s more complex than that, right?

Mary Sheehan (15:10): Yeah, definitely. So yeah, one aspect of it, of course is like what is the best time to launch seasonality wise or when, not in the middle of summer where everyone’s on vacation and won’t hear, you know, anything about this. But that’s one aspect of it. But the more important aspect of it is product readiness and marketing and aligning that. So sometimes, you know, a tech company’s product managers and engineering teams are used to just shipping things whenever it’s ready. But when you partner really closely with marketing, it becomes a conversation about making sure that you’re amplifying all of your resources together at the same time to make that big splash. So that might include having new advertising creatives, a whole new website, refresh events, you know, all these kind of things that if you partner together really well. So that means that the product can’t go early, which happens a lot and it also can’t go late or otherwise you don’t have anything to talk about at the big event. So actually

John Jantsch (16:03): Two weeks after the trade show, right? Yeah. .

Mary Sheehan (16:06): Yeah. Not gonna be, yeah, if you’re launching at CS and you don’t have anything to launch with, that’s not gonna apply. So actually connecting those dots is pretty complicated and making sure that you have milestones along the way and really tight team communication is a way that I found that has made it more successful.

John Jantsch (16:23): So in larger organizations like Google or Adobe, I mean, is there a head of the product launch that is really trying to bring all of those together?

Mary Sheehan (16:31): I think at any size company there should be a point person. So whether it’s the product marketer or the product manager or even the founder, if it’s, you know, if you’re a small team, I think that there should be one person that’s sort of manning the entire end-to-end. But obviously there’s so many partners, you know, depending on the complexity of the launch that help and kind of assist. But I’ve always found one point person to be best.

John Jantsch (16:55): So do product people hate marketing people? Is that what you’re saying?

Mary Sheehan (16:58): No, I think that you can, to be best friends, I think sometimes you walk in the door and product people are like, who’s this marketing person? But I think showing that you have, you’re trying to help each other, you’re trying to actually work towards the same goals. And that’s how, that’s, you know, this podcast could be about making product managers your best friends. , that’s my goal too. .

John Jantsch (17:20): So we have focused a little bit on larger organizations. A lot of listeners to this show are small business owners, founders, maybe solopreneurs in some cases. How would this, how would you suggest that this book applies to them?

Mary Sheehan (17:35): Yeah, absolutely. And I have several people that have reached out to me that have small businesses that have said that this has really helped them. And I think that, you know, at the heart of it, it’s going to be the same thing. You’re going to have a plan, you’re gonna try to understand who your customer is in, you know, deepest way as possible, and then you’re gonna execute on that plan. So what this actually provides is a way of thinking about that and a way of constructing a framework to input all the things that you know about your audience, where you can reach them and how to do it in the most cost effective way. So it’s really about just thinking, hey, maybe you’re not gonna do a huge trade show event, right? But maybe you’re gonna make flyers or maybe you’re gonna have a smaller event where you have a booth or maybe you’re gonna go do, you know, a big launch at grocery stores if you’re selling cpg. Good. So depending on, you know, what type of product it is, just, you know, really thinking about that end-to-end attorney for your customer and where it makes sense.

John Jantsch (18:30): You know, in, in a lot of ways, as I listen to you explain that, I mean, you really could take this framework and apply it to some sort of internal initiative too, right? I mean, let’s say we’re going to like switch from, I don’t know, one CRM to another or something like that. I’m, I mean, you still want to have a plan, you still want to get the buy-in from the people that are gonna use it. , you still wanna get feedback. I mean it really is, we’re not, I mean I think it’s more universal than just a product launch, so to speak.

Mary Sheehan (18:57): I totally agree. And sometimes when I’m doing bigger projects at work, if I’m like, you know what this is, I need to just think about this as a launch and it kinda all makes sense. So

John Jantsch (19:06): Yeah, and it’s kinda like journey mapping almost. It’s like what are all the, you know, stages, you know, what are people feeling at this stage, what they need to hear, you know, to go to this next stage. So it, I think there’s a lot of applications just in a, as a general business framework.

Mary Sheehan (19:19): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (19:21): So you may have already answered this, but I like to leave people with, you know, what’s the hardest part about launching a product?

Mary Sheehan (19:29): So I think the hardest part about launching is nailing the timing and nailing the customer message. And so I think that, you know, putting some thought into both of those, you will be a lot better suited to launch than you’re just winging it.

John Jantsch (19:46): Yeah. Well Mary, I wanna thank you for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Where do you wanna invite people to connect with you? Certainly to pick up the pocket guide to product launches.

Mary Sheehan (19:56): Thank you. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @marysheehanpmm or on LinkedIn. And the book is called A Pocket Guide to Product Launches. It’s available anywhere you buy books, Amazon, particularly . And I also have a podcast too, like you mentioned called Women in Product Marketing, if you’re interested in hearing more.

John Jantsch (20:15): And your current work is really around consulting with folks on product launches. Is that,

Mary Sheehan (20:21): Yeah, so currently I’m working full-time at Adobe and so I’m running product on

John Jantsch (20:25): Oh you still,

Mary Sheehan (20:26): Okay. Yeah. And the, I have taken a little bit of a backseat of consulting nowadays, but more, you know, happy to have a conversation with anyone that’s interested.

John Jantsch (20:35): Okay, well what’s the top secret not yet announced except for on this show product coming from Adobe.

Mary Sheehan (20:42): I can’t say a word John, but look out , there’s some great things coming. ,

John Jantsch (20:47): Awesome. Buy Adobe stock. That’s my advice. So, so thanks again for taking a few moments to stop by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there as soon on the road.

Mary Sheehan (20:56): Sounds great, Sean, thanks so much.

John Jantsch (20:57): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kate Volman. She’s the CEO of Floyd Coaching. With over 20 years of experience in developing and leading life-changing programs for entrepreneurs and leaders, she has a passion for helping people grow. And today we’re gonna talk about her new book Do What You Love: A Guide to Living Your Creative Life Without Leaving Your Job. So Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate Volman (01:22): Thank you so much for having me, John. Such a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:26): So I wanna start with what I see as a bit of a twist. I think the Do What You Love mantra has certainly been out there for quite some time, but this idea of l without leaving your job, you know, I think most books are like, no, go for it. Like , you know, you can do this. And so, so talk to me a little bit about why you built that caveat, if you will, into this book.

Kate Volman (01:48): Yeah, so it’s so funny that is your first question because I spent so much time thinking about this book and how is it different than all these other books that are basically saying, go out and live your dreams and do your thing . And what I’ve discovered over the many years that I’ve had in coaching so many people, and obviously in the work that I get to do at Floyd Coaching, so many of the clients that we have, they have a full-time role. And when we are coaching them, I un what we get, what uncover what is uncovered is they are unsatisfied for a number of different reasons. They think it’s work. They think that they need to kind of cha change their entire life and go do something completely different. When really when we dig deep, it’s like they’ve given up playing the guitar, they used to sing, they love to dance, they wanna create videos, maybe they wanna start a blog or a side hustle, and they feel as though they, it is all or nothing. They, they either have to leave their job and figure it out, or they have to stay there and be miserable. No, you get to live your creative life and do, and pursue your creative passions and stay in a role if should you choose to.

John Jantsch (02:56): You know, it’s interesting, I could see a lot, I could see a, of employers, I think this mindset’s changing, but certainly a lot of employers that would say, no, I want, you know, I want, I want you all in, you know, to your job that this is like, this is your, you know, everything, your growth, all of your extra reading, everything should be , you know, focused here. And you could make a case for saying, I, I would guess if somebody, you know, for a lot of people jobs, I got bills to pay and I, you know, I’m trying to, you know, raise my children and send them to college. So having actually that creative outlet in some ways I would suggest to employers might actually make for a better employee if they actually encouraged it. Absolutely.

Kate Volman (03:34): Right. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, that’s so much of what I talk about in the book is when we, if we’re, if that’s all we’re focused on is busy, yeah. And we’re sometimes the best ideas come from when we’re out in the garden or we’re taking a walk. There’s so much data and research that shows we have to get out of our work environment sometimes. And it’s those things that bring you so much joy. And what’s so beautiful is when you start to pursue your creativity and some of those passion projects, all of you become more engaged. You become more engaged in your personal life, which then in turn you become more engaged in your professional life. So you automatically not only are becoming a better team member, you’re becoming a better parent and spouse, significant other friend, coworker, teammate, all of these things simply because you’re getting so much energy out of those creative pursuits. And it’s just a beautiful thing to watch. I mean, Matthew Kelly wrote the Dream Manager, and that’s the basic concept of the book. Your organization can only be the best version of itself to the extent that your people are becoming better versions of themselves. And when we are encouraging our team members to explore their creative passions, all of that stuff is gonna be infused into the other areas of their lives, including their business. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:48): And I think sometimes personal development is missing in a lot of, you know, certainly in job descriptions, but in actually a lot of workplaces. You know, one of the things that I think is great about being an entrepreneur, owning your own business, I think it’s probably the greatest personal development program ever created . I mean, because you have to evolve as a person or you’re gonna die, you know, as an entrepreneur. And that’s not necessarily true. You know, when here’s your paycheck, you know, show up nine to five. So I think a lot of people that are in careers, you know, their personal development sometimes suffers unless they’re in a workplace with a culture that really develops it.

Kate Volman (05:22): Yeah, I think it’s important as leaders, I mean, as leaders, our number one role is to help our people grow. And how do you do that? Of course, you want them to get better in their role, and you wanna provide that kind of development and training so that they get better in the role that they’re in and the tasks they need to do, but then also encouraging them to explore those other passions, those other things that really light them up and really bring joy to their life. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:45): We, I didn’t want to, I wasn’t gonna spend this much time on this, but I think it’s a fascinating conversation. I mean, do you think that actually as a leader of a team or of an organization that you really should be trying to like find out what are those passions and, you know, is there a way that we could actually participate in you, you know, realizing some of those, I mean, is that crossing the line or is that something that you think would be a healthy, you know, business relationship?

Kate Volman (06:08): Oh my gosh, absolutely. Oh yes. Those are conversations that should be had all the time. So one of the things that I think is so beautiful, so I run, uh, Floyd Coaching, which was founded by Matthew Kelly, who again wrote the Dream Manager. And in that, in that the whole idea of asking your team members about their dreams, right? Right. Like, what are the dreams that you have for your life? And you start to see them become more engaged. And then what’s so great is, as a leader, when you know what their dreams are, you’re getting to know them a little bit more. You get to know their mindset, and you get to encourage them to pursue those dreams. And when they do that, think about the relationship that you’re building with that person, right? Oh, John cares about me as a human being, not just that I come into work and do this job.

(06:50): And in the book he shares the 12 areas of dreams. We have dreams in all areas, professional, phy, physical material, psychological character, and we have creative dreams, and we lose sight of those. It’s kind of easy in business, right? We have professional dreams, we wanna get promoted, and we have financial dreams, and we all know about those. And so those are ones that we think about our material dreams. Those are ones kind of in our face all the time. But when we think about these other areas, like our character dreams, your legacy dreams, your creative dreams, and the creative one, I have to say, most of our clients have such a hard time putting the, those, filling that box up, because we’ve stopped feeling like we can be creative. And I believe that we are all artists, like you are the artist of your life. And so, yes, as a leader, we need to know what our people care about. When we know what our people care about, we can lead them better. We can coach them better. We know what drives them, we know what’s motivated, what’s motivating them, and we can build better relationships with not only that person, but within the entire team.

John Jantsch (07:53): Yeah. I, I suspect part of what holds people back is the very narrow definition of creativity. Meaning I have to have a paintbrush in my hand, you know? Yes. Or I’m not, you know, creating art. I mean, I think most people, if they really reflect on what their day looks like, they are creatively making decisions all day long. , you know, and I think that’s expanding that, you know, I think helps people. The book is essentially outlined or set up around seven myths that you must hear from time to time when you encourage people to, you know, to follow this dream. And so let’s just kind of, we don’t have to cover ’em all, maybe we will see how far we get, but obviously by the book, you get the full display of the myth. But let’s just, I’ll just kind of tee it up and you kind of talk about how this shows up in some of the folks that you work with. So the first one is people just feel like, I got a job, I got, you know, that’s crazy. It’s not possible . So, you know, how do you bat that myth down?

Kate Volman (08:46): Yeah, I mean, myth number one is not possible. I mean, we think about, we go through life, and especially as we get older and things get a little more challenging, we have things that get thrown in our direction, right? We, it used to be more carefree living, and now we have kids and bills and all the things that we need to do. And so we actually have this mindset sometimes of it’s not possible. Like, it’s not possible for me to make money and go to and have a job and do these things and also pursue my creativity. Like, it just, it’s not possible. If we don’t believe it’s possible, then we’re not gonna be encouraged to take any steps towards making it happen.

John Jantsch (09:22): All right. Number two, I’m gonna debate a little bit. You’re not good enough, , your dream. My dream is to be a left-handed major league pitcher. And first off, I’m not left-handed. And secondly, you know, my fast ball is very hittable, so I just don’t know. But again, I’ll tee that one up. You’re not good enough,

Kate Volman (09:41): , okay? So you’re not good enough. Now, this is in the sense of pursuing your passions, right? So maybe you’re not good enough to become the NBA player that you want to become, but you are good enough to play basketball to go out with your friends, to go hang out, to get in the league, to, you know, to, and that if you really love something so much, you’re doing it for fun, you’re doing it for the joy of it, right? Yeah. So, so that myth is really around, I see so many people stop themselves from starting the podcast or writing the book because they think, oh, my ideas don’t matter, I’m not good enough yet, they’re waiting for the right, they’re waiting for the time where they’re feeling like, yep, here I am, I have everything in place, and I am enough. When really you’re enough exactly as you are right now, and whatever those creative pursuits are that you’re interested in going after, hey, go for it. You’re not gonna be like, you’re not gonna have a John Jan podcast where it’s, you know, he’s done so many and he is, and he’s at a very different level. But you’re good enough to start your own podcast right now.

John Jantsch (10:45): Yeah, I mean, there’s a whole lot of teachings mo mostly Eastern teachings, about how valuable it is to actually be a beginner at something and to, you know, to experience the fact that you’re not good at something is because you will eventually get there. Cuz you know, this whole talk about do what you love and the money will follow, you know, all of that. I think that there’s a little bit of misleading information in that sometimes there has to be a demand for what you love and there, you know, things like that. But I also think that when people get good at stuff, like, there’s things that I didn’t love in the beginning that I love now, because I’m kind of good at ’em. And, you know, had I just said, oh, I’m not gonna be a writer, or I’m not gonna be a speaker, you know, because I’m not good at ’em, you, you know, or because I don’t really think I love it, you know, now, and obviously those have been, you know, huge parts of my business and my growth.

Kate Volman (11:34): Yeah, I mean, I, and look, the, the, it’s part of what the myth is, right? I mean, one of the, well, myth number four is you need a reason. We’re kind of skipping, we skipped over myth number three, but you need a reason. And one of the reasons why I put this one in there is because of what you just said, which is, oh, do what you love and the money will follow. So that’s not the book’s about, we’re not talking about like making this your career. We’re talking about you. You don’t need a reason to pursue your creativity. If you love to write, I love, I started writing and or writing poetry. I never was really into poetry. Do I wanna be a poet for a living? No, but you never know if I start writing poetry now, what’s, what is my poetry gonna look like 10 years from now if I practice it every day simply for the joy of it?

(12:19): Now, how does it make me a better leader? Makes me a better leader? Because poetry is so interesting. You have to find things that are fascinating to put ideas together and make something work. And that’s what you do in business. It also helps in my writing, this helped me write the book studying poetry and what that was like. And I wanted it to feel like a very good flow moving book, which is a lot of what poetry is. And so this is why it’s not about the money. Now, obviously, if somebody wants to start a podcast and make money, for sure, be more strategic about it. But we’re talking about two different things. Yep. This is why I have that caveat of, without leaving your job, do you, if you want to one day leave your job, the myths in this book will still help you with that goal down the line. But you know, it’s really giving people permission to explore their creativity a little bit more than they are used to.

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(14:59): Well, and I wonder how many people that started like that, oh, I’m not gonna be a poet, or I’m not gonna write music, or, you know, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, like three years later, th they’re rocking it. It is like that’s what they decided they were meant to do. And now they’ve actually, you know, instead of putting it off because they needed a reason, , they just did it. And who knows? It turned into something that there wasn’t the intention, but it turned into something. So we did skip over. You need permission. And I think that that’s an interesting one because there’s a lot of people we think need, we need permission from. I mean, you think about all of our roles and responsibilities in life and a lot of, you know, right or wrong, we probably assign the need for permission to all of those responsibilities that we have.

Kate Volman (15:47): Yeah. We feel like it’s almost like we, we wanna get picked, right? Like we want somebody to reach out to us and say, Hey, you should start a podcast, or you should go pursue that creative project. Or you should go try out for the play when no, you, we need to give ourselves permission cause nobody else is gonna do that for us, right? Like, we have to give ourselves permission to start creating. And then what you just said is when you start putting yourself out there and when you start giving yourself that permission, that’s when other people might find you. They might wanna collaborate with you, they might find your content and really find it interesting and want to do something with you. But when we’re waiting for permission, we’re gonna be waiting a long time. If we’re waiting for somebody to call us up and say, Hey here, do the thing you keep saying you want to do

John Jantsch (16:34): Well. And sadly, you know, as part of the human condition, there are people out there that maybe don’t want us to grow that way or to That’s right. Succeed that way. And so, you know, sometimes you’ve gotta just like bust through that too. There’s not enough time. I mean, I’m sure that one probably oughta be number one, probably to tell you true because I’m sure a lot of people would say that now a lot of those same people fill their lives up with time wasting. But, and I’m sure that’s part of your myth busting, but what do you tell people when they say, I got this and I got that. I don’t have time.

Kate Volman (17:04): Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It’s, I used to run this workshop of called Inspired Action and uh, it was a group, it was a mastermind group, it was specifically for women, eight to 10 women. And this one was so fun cuz we, this section, we, we would always have a good laugh because what did we do? I had them do this exercise where they had time wasters and time enhancers, right? Like we both know both of those different things in our lives. And those time wasters are the things that have just over the years gotten even harder to get over, which cuz of social media, we scroll on social media, we do online shopping for things we don’t need. We do all of these things that waste so much of our time when really we should be investing in our time differently.

(17:47): And so I always find it so fascinating how we all say we need more time. Yet when something is truly important to you, you figure out how to make it work. You figure out how you’re gonna squeeze in five minutes here, 10 minutes there. And that’s another piece is I think that oftentimes people say people, especially when they talk about writing a book, they think, oh, I need 10 hours a day I need, or four hours or two hours a day. Yeah, no, you can literally, Hey, if you have 10 minutes, great. If you have 30 minutes, great. And what usually happens is when you give yourself that tiny little block of time to start writing or pursuing something, you’ll notice you’ll stay there a little bit longer. Yeah. When, because you’re realizing that, oh my gosh, I actually really do enjoy this. I actually am now excited to finish writing the book or the article or whatever it is. And so we have to really identify what are those time wasters and what are those time enhancers? And then figure out how do you limit or get rid of some of those time wass because hey, we all do them. We’ve all spent a little too much time scrolling on social media when we could be doing something else that we would feel much better about at the end of whatever amount, length of time that is.

John Jantsch (18:54): Well, and I think, you know, there’s a name for this theory, but just that, you know, we’re gonna fill up the space that we have and we’re either gonna fill it up with doing something we love or we’re gonna fill it up doing something stupid , you know? But you know, I, a few years ago I just decided to stop doing much on Fridays from a work standpoint. And I’m, every bit is productive, you know, it’s like, wait a minute, whole, like one out of five days, I’m no longer working or taking your appointments and I’m still getting as much done. What happened? You know, , I mean

Kate Volman (19:22): Exactly. .

John Jantsch (19:24): So Exactly. It has to be perfect. This is a great one because I’m an am an amateur woodworker, and I, you know, I wa I try to build furniture and I watch what other people do and I, you know, I always tell my wife, oh, I couldn’t get this part right, she’s not perfect. And she’s like, is that why you built it? And she’s like, no, . But there is a little bit of that, right? It’s like, I can’t, I don’t want to be no good .

Kate Volman (19:50): I know. Yeah. We don’t, we, I mean me because mediocre work is not the end result, right? We don’t want to be mediocre at anything, but everyone has to start somewhere and Right. Like, I love why I love when somebody has somebody online who I’ve followed for years and years. I’m like, oh my gosh, they’ve accomplished so many things. And we look up to those people and then we go back to maybe their first blog or their first podcast or YouTube video, you’re like, oh, they were really not that great. Right? But after so many repetitions of doing it. And so it has to be perfect. We all, I, for a lot of, especially very driven type A individuals, we have this like perfectionism complex and we can te we know that perfect doesn’t exist, right? We can say that and have that conversation, yet we’re still striving for it.

(20:38): We’re like, no, we could get it perfect. And this is a challenge for us and it stops us from actually starting. And so in the book, I actually talk about the passion loop. So we have this passion loop where we have this idea of this passion or creative pursuit that we have, and then we say, I wanna do that. Like I, I actually wanna do that. And then we make these excuses, right? Like we immediately think I wanna do that. And then we make excuses and then we don’t do anything about it. And one of those excuses is like, I’m not ready, I’ve, it’s, I’m not a, there’s not enough time. It has to be perfect. All those things. And then what happens like a week later, a month later, we have that same idea again. Like, Ooh, I wanna start that podcast, I’m gonna do it.

(21:21): Excuses. And we’re stuck in this passion loop, huh? When really how to get out of the passion loop. The simplest way to get out of the passion loop is take the first step. Like that is all you have to do is take one step, even when you’re scared, even when you d don’t think, you know, you take that one next step to towards that patching project. And what’s so awesome is that when you’re, when you do that, all of these things br when you’re breaking through that passion loop, you start to uncover new opportunities, new passions, new relationships, new skills, confidence, all of this stuff. And so unless we’re doing the work and showing up every day, we’re never gonna get better. We’re never gonna go be able to, I mean we’ll never attain perfect, right? Yeah. But we’re never gonna even get better. And so this idea of, hey, it’s okay to be mediocre, it’s okay to have, you know, my first podcast isn’t gonna be stellar if you love it and you’re putting all, every single bit of energy and passion that you have and you know it’s the best that it can be right now.

(22:21): Yeah, that’s amazing. Put it out into the world. I’ve never met an author that said my, I would never change anything from the books that I’ve written. They’ve all said to me, when your book is out into the world, you read it and you’re like, oh, why did I say that? I should have done this. I could have done that. It’s the same thing with all of our work. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:38): Plus’s, the feedback you get, you know, people actually do tell you how to make it better. kids. Yes. . So y you know what’s what, as I listen to you talk about that loop, you know, there’s a part missing out of that is then regret starts dropping. You know, because like, uh, I’ve told myself a hundred times I’m gonna do this and on 99 times I haven’t done it. And so then you’re like, well see I’m a loser . You know? So it’s like a vicious cycle, isn’t it?

Kate Volman (23:05): Yeah. . Yeah. And it’s like, that’s the thing, that’s why we gotta break out of that passion loop as whenever we’re dealing with these myths. It’s just, yeah. Hey, we gotta go for it.

John Jantsch (23:15): So inspirational strike is the seventh myth, and I’ll just let you tee that one out.

Kate Volman (23:22): Okay. So what’s so funny about this myth is this is, I was so excited to write this chapter and it was probably the hardest one to write cuz I was like, there’s so many things about this inspiration will strike. Because I think so many of us, we feel as though we’re gonna have this epiphany moment of, and I talk about muses in the book and I’m like, oh, I love this idea of muses and we think they’re gonna come fluttering down from the sky and pour magic pixie dust on us. And all of a sudden we’re gonna feel like writing or we’re gonna feel like recording something, or we’re gonna feel like getting up and playing guitar even though we love guitar. When really when we get home from the office or a long day, sometimes we just, you know, we think I just wanna veja on the couch, right?

(24:04): But what’s so interesting is that, so inspiration doesn’t just strike out of the blue. Yeah. It strikes when you actually start doing the thing. So when you start playing the guitar or when you start writing, like, I know so many writers, so especially when I started writing the book, I studied so many incredible writers like Anne Lamont and Stephen King, and I was reading and Margaret Atwood and I was so fascinated by the creative process and how they talk about writing and how so many writers actually don’t love to write like they say, I love to have written. And it’s like you have to sit down and write. So when you sit down and do the work and you start that project, that’s when inspiration comes. Like, on the days I didn’t feel like writing, I gave myself this goal of writing at least 250 words every day, right?

(24:51): So I sat behind my computer at least 250 words and some days it was 250 and I was like, I’m done. But most days it was 250 words and I was like, oh, well now I’m into it. Now I’m excited to like play around with this. And so inspiration came after I did the work, like after we started working. And so that’s what this chapter is all about. And I share this one story about Stephen King cuz his book on writing, I love it. He talks about how the muse, he’s like, yeah, there is a muse. He’s, and he describes him as he’s a basement kind of guy and he, and you have to go down into the basement and he’s there and he’s kind of waiting for you to show, he waits for you to show up and do the work. And only by going down into that basement and being with that muse and he’s just sitting over there smoking his cigar and looking at his bowling trophies, he said, you gotta do the work. And then all of a sudden the muse will show up. And so the muse sh finds you when you are working. So the inspiration won’t just come to you. No one’s gonna grab you off the couch and tell you to go after your dreams. You have to start. And when you start you’ll uncover, oh my gosh, I am now excited about this. And that’s when the inspiration comes from doing the work.

John Jantsch (25:58): You mentioned Anne Lamont, her chapter, shitty First drafts, you know, is a similar idea there of many times. I was the same way. It’s like, if I don’t get this, whatever is blocking me out on a page, you know, I’m never gonna get going. And that’s true for me. It even playing the guitar, which I happen to do as well, getting started is always, I don’t ever feel like doing it. And then once I pick it up, you know, I, well I might keep doing this for a while. So it is getting the getting started. So I think that is, if you’re gonna give anybody practical advice, you know, the getting started is the most important thing because then it, you know, then it’ll roll from there. But the most doubt and fear and pressure that you’ll feel is the moment, you know, when you’re thinking about, you know, starting.

Kate Volman (26:44): Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one other thing that I talk about in the book is creative friends and the importance of having creative friends. And I look at creative friends as people that not only do they support you in your work, but they are also creating, they are out there, they are trying, they are dealing with these same myths because we need those people in our lives to help support us as we grow. I mean, look, I look at John as one of my creative friends. You’re out there, you’re doing all this stuff, you’re never gonna put me down for creating, even if what I do is not perfect. Cause you’re like, Hey, at least you’re doing it right. Like you’re doing it. You’re out there, you’re gonna get better. And so we all need that. And I think so many times we are, when we’re surrounded by others that aren’t pursuing their dreams and their passions, we can get stuck in into some of these myths.

(27:32): Especially number one, it’s not possible. So when we’re building our network of creative friends that are out there, they’re in the trenches, they’re putting stuff out, they’re being vulnerable, they’re putting in the work. Even when it’s hard, they show up every single day, even when they don’t feel like it. This is, we need more of those people in our lives. So it encourages us to keep going and it encourages us to keep creating, keep sharing, and just keep pursuing the things that we know are meant for us. Like your creative pursuits are inside of you for a reason. They’re not going anywhere like they’re there to stay. And so it’s up to us to feed them.

John Jantsch (28:07): Yeah, absolutely. Well, Kate, we are out of time, but thank you so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to, where would you invite people to connect with you, find out more about to coaching and obviously the book, do What you love?

Kate Volman (28:19): Yeah, the quickest, easiest way is just go to katevolman.com. You can find all my social channels on there and would love to hear from any of you about the book and what you have going on. And of course you are creative, so go create something.

John Jantsch (28:33): Awesome. Well thanks for taking a moment out. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road again, Kate.

Kate Volman (28:39): I hope so. Thanks so much, John. Hey,

John Jantsch (28:41): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Lenox. He is the Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He has served on the faculty at Duke and NYU and as a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. He holds a PhD from MIT in Technology Management and Policy. And we’re gonna talk about his new book Today Strategy in the Digital Age: Mastering Digital Transformation. So, Mike, that was a mouthful, but welcome to the show.

Mike Lenox (01:28): John. Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (01:30): You spend a lot of time with textbooks. I think

Mike Lenox (01:32): , I do enjoy writing

John Jantsch (01:35): .

(01:36): So, uh, my first question is gonna sound like a silly question, but I think it’s, I think it’s legitimate based on all the conversations I have with people about strategy, um, and their, uh, confusion about what the term actually means. , uh, I thought I’d start there. Um, how do, how do you define strategy?

Mike Lenox (01:53): Oh, that’s an excellent question. You know, in our MBA classes, we always start with what, uh, we refer to as the strategist challenge. And so to me, the strategist challenge is about finding valuable positions at the intersection of three things. Uh, your values and mission as an organization, absolutely critical. That’s your north star, defining who you are and what you aspire to be, the opportunities that the market provides to you. So this is competition, it’s demand, it’s all those things that influence what is available to you. And then last but not least, your capabilities as an organization. And so the key for strategy is how do you identify and then achieve and protect those valuable competitive positions at the intersection of those three things.

John Jantsch (02:36): So it’s not really just a list of tactics, is that what you’re

Mike Lenox (02:39): Saying? Absolutely not, no. It’s about trying to figure out where to point, you know, where to point the ship.

John Jantsch (02:44): It’s kinda like how you’re gonna, you’re marketing the market, right? So again, in the title, uh, strategy in the digital age, how would you define the change or how somebody might look at digital strategy versus, I don’t know, regular strategy or ? Or has it really just become a, you know, such a significant component? It’s just part of the overall strategy.

Mike Lenox (03:10): I, I think that’s right. I mean, I think in many ways digital strategy is just strategy in the same way, digital marketing is really just marketing in this day and age. And I think one of the points, uh, that I make in the book is that the digital agents having impacts not only in those sectors that we might call technology sectors or technology companies, but it’s really pervasive. I am hard pressed to find an industry in a sector that is not being impacted by digital technologies. Now, one level strategy stays the same basis for kind of understanding markets and competition don’t fundamentally change just because we’re in this digital age. But there are certain ways in which the digital age is having maybe differential impacts than what we’ve seen in the past. And a lot of what the book is about is really trying to understand like, how fundamentally are these digital opportunities transforming those market opportunities?

John Jantsch (04:02): Yeah, and I, I, I have to admit, when I first saw the book and the title of the book, you know, in my mind, maybe it’s my own bias, you know, kinda leap to, oh, you know, we was talking about websites and social media, and, you know, all the digital stuff. But really as you started to allude to there, it’s really more about how digital technologies enable the creation of services and products and maybe an entire industries . So, so talk to me a little bit about, I mean, that’s a much bigger conversation, isn’t it?

Mike Lenox (04:30): Yeah. And the book, we, we talk about a number of kind of fundamental things that digitization is doing in a variety of industries. One, fundamentally changing the customer value proposition. Uh, now we find that you, you are constantly engaging your customers, collecting data, using that to refine the products and services that you’re offering. It has ways that fundamentally changes the operations and the ways you deliver value and creating opportunities to both increase value and simultaneously lower costs through various kind of efficiency opportunities. And then perhaps even more fundamental, we’re seeing things like what we call the de construction of the value chain. That what used to be more vertically integrated efforts by different companies are being picked apart by especially entrepreneurs coming in and taking various pieces of their value chain, again, leveraging digital. But really at the heart of it that, you know, we really kind of center most of the book on is this idea that data has really gained primacy. You know, people talk about data as the new oil in our economy here. And that the economics of data, especially the scalability of data and what that does for you, can really change again, the nature of competition within an industry.

John Jantsch (05:43): I’m gonna jump around a little bit here based since you opened that up. I mean, AI is essentially a technology that is massaging data . So, so what are some of the, let’s go on both sides of that. What are some of the opportunities, but then what are some of the threats?

Mike Lenox (05:59): Yeah, absolutely. Well, obviously generative AI in particular with ChatGPT is on everybody’s mind these days. But we should observe that AI is, it’s been around for a while. It has many different forms and is affecting many different things, including autonomy. It’s impacting, you know, the use of industrial processes, not just, you know, the fun, uh, language generators that we’ve been all playing with over the last few months here. I think it is quite disruptive and has a lot of potential in a lot of different directions. And again, I think it’s, you know, goes to maybe even the fundamental construction of some of our, some of our industries there. But it’s not just generative ai. You know, I point out blockchain is another one that gets a lot of excitement and buzz. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, the Metaverse is, you know, coming soon, the use of VR things like digital twins. There’s a whole host of kind of interesting applications and technologies that we’re seeing. And in many ways these are all kind of overlapping and intersecting in interesting ways that, again, forward thinking businesses are, are figuring out how to capitalize on.

John Jantsch (06:59): So, so the book does present a framework for somebody who is thinking, gosh, I need to get on board here. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, what would be a typical way, uh, that you would work with in an organization? Cuz I’m sure that, uh, I mean, there’s still people that cryptocurrency is like an unknown word to them, , but then there certainly are people that are as, you know, as the buzz around, say, ChatGPT comes, you know, there’s more and more people at least saying, I need to figure out what this is. How would you work with somebody to help them uncover where their opportunities might be or where they might actually be in real danger, Yeah. Of being disrupted.

Mike Lenox (07:35): Yeah. And I think, you know, uh, the one side, while I believe that we’re seeing disruption in many different ways, we also have to be careful of kind of a hype cycle, right? Yeah. That some of these technologies get ahead of themselves, now the world is ending to certain pundits, and then, you know, it never really comes forward. One of the things we talk about, or I talk about in the book is industry life cycles. You know, we have a long history of kind of studying how industry has evolved over time, and there’s patterns we can look at, uh, that help us understand when new technologies come about, how are they gonna play out. Um, so in the simplest case, you know, s curves, um, the simple idea that early in the stage of a technology, you might see a lot of investment, but not much improvement.

(08:16): But if it’s gonna be disruptive, you go through these exponential growth periods in which the technology, you know, really begins to improve and, and change the marketplace. And then eventually you get a kind of lessening of that impact as we kind of figure things out over time, that has huge impacts for, you know, entrepreneurial entry, how incumbent firms respond, being, uh, responsive to these kind of timing and trends. I, I think in this day and age, trying to always be on the cutting edge, know exactly what’s coming down the pipeline is a very hard task to do. And I think this is where the strategy piece comes in. I I always talk about, you know, strategy is never meant to be static. It’s not meant to be kind of set in stone and off you go. It’s a constant process of reflection where you have to be thinking about, all right, here’s the latest new thing, ChatGPT is out there, what are the impacts here? And to think through kind of the underlying economics of what is that gonna do to our market structure?

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(11:02): Ironically, you mentioned oil. I was going to, you, you were using it as a metaphor for data. Let’s take that industry on, you know, what’s the strategy for replacing an an old entrenched industry? I, I mean it’s, we’ve been talking about clean tech for a long time. Yeah. So, you know, what’s the approach for, and I know that you are passionate about climate change and have written, uh, some other works, uh, directly related to that. So what’s the strategy for, you know, that young startup to take on a really big entrenched industry that doesn’t want to go away?

Mike Lenox (11:36): Yeah, as you mentioned, this is another passion of mine. Another area, I’ve written some books, uh, and they do overlap. Actually. There are some things in advances of digital technology that could help us advance clean technology as well. You know, I think there’s a couple ways to answer your question. One, not to be too cute about it. What we often see when they see these massive disruptions and, and kind of major shifts in technology is often incumbent firms fail. They go out of business. And of course that’s not great advice to those incumbent firms. So what do you do? I think the key is trying to understand what capabilities you currently exist that you can transform to the new market opportunities that are emerging. Recognizing it’s really hard to just completely reinvent yourself. I run into a lot of companies who say, you know, they want to be the Google of X, you know, and they have this vision for who they’re gonna be.

(12:25): And my quick response is often Google’s gonna be the Google of X. They’re better positioned than you are to, you know, occupy that position. So while we call it, you know, starting where I began with the strategist challenge, the reason it’s a challenge is understanding that as the market shifts and those opportunities maybe moved from where they historically been, how do you evolve your capabilities? And I say evolve because again, you can’t just reinvent wholesale typically to where the market goes. So using your example for oil, I’m doubtful that the oil companies and fossil fuel companies will transform into clean energy companies just simply because they’re just radically different. They’re not even different technology, they’re different marketplaces in many cases here, but there are opportunities for them and maybe in some cases leveraging digital technology to improve their operations. Sure. Do better at exploration and extraction, you know, increase efficiencies, maybe reduce some of their direct environmental impact they have from, uh, from extracting fossil fuels. So again, there’s a role for digital, there’s a role for even clean with those companies, but I don’t expect them to all become digitally, you know, AI companies tomorrow for any, you know, any reason.

John Jantsch (13:34): But at some point, you know, a lot of entrenched industries, you know, hang on because it’s so expensive to change or because they have to, you know, gut the cash cow in order to change, but at some point, you know, they get, they get replaced. So, you know, how does a, and again, I’m not dreaming the oil companies are going away anytime soon, but you know, how does a company that might example I love to use is the classified for newspapers? You know, they, that was the cash cow for newspapers. Yeah. The classified ads. Right. And they closed their eyes to Craigslist and, you know, that business went away and where they could have owned it, you know, they could have, you know, they could have transformed at a moment, but it would’ve literally meant throwing money out the window. Yeah. Which, you know, nobody had the appetite to do. So how does a company who sees maybe sees this coming, you know, how do they, you know, brace for the impact that’s not gonna be that positive.

Mike Lenox (14:28): Yeah. And I think this, you know, problems of incumbency, if you will, are very common, right? And I have so many examples that I share with companies that I work with of, of the failed attempts. And I’m always asked the question of where are the successes? And, and in fact, they’re few and far between. They are harder to find those companies who can radically transform themselves in the face of some of these trends that we’re seeing. Yeah. I go back to again, this notion that you have to build your strategy off of at least some elements of your current capabilities. Mm-hmm. , what can you bring to the marketplace that provides value in this digitally transforming world? The other thing the book spends a lot of time on, and I have different frameworks that help, uh, businesses think through, gets back to this, where is the position that you can best occupy and, and appropriate some value for your, you know, shareholders and for your stakeholders in this evolving, um, marketplace here?

(15:21): And it might be somewhat different than where you’ve occupied in the past. It might not be exactly how you envisioned yourself to start off with, just give you two examples of companies who used to play in the smartphone market. Blackberry and Qualcomm, , both of them made different decisions, right? One, Qualcomm moved upstream and became more of an innovator with patents and the like, that provide some of the core technology for, you know, your smartphones and the like. And then Blackberry recognizing that their old handset model wasn’t going to work, moved into digital security, cybersecurity protection, and the like. So again, it was kind of a reflection that the marketplace was changing. They needed to shift their capabilities to a kind of a new position, a new part of the value chain where they could actually continue to, uh, survive and thrive.

John Jantsch (16:08): So I’m with you. I think the media, particularly new technologies, likes to, you know, kind of say, oh, here’s the scariest scenario. But there really are, I mean, there are some social implications, some policy, some governing, you know, some regulations, antitrust, um, you know, when you start talking about the Googles and the Metas of the world, um, you know, where does that fit into, you know, the sort of enthusiastic rush to all things digital?

Mike Lenox (16:36): Yeah, I, we, I have a whole chapter basically on these kind of broader societal issues with tech. And I think from a company standpoint, my main point is you need to be thoughtful and proactive about this. You know, going back to data and the primacy of data mm-hmm. , you know, what do you feel comfortable and not comfortable doing with user data, critical question that every company needs to address, uh, when it comes to ai, what types of decisions are you willing to an essence seed to the ai? And where do you feel that’s not appropriate? Um, one of the things I talk about in the book that I’m borrowing from colleagues of mine at the University of Toronto is this idea that what AI does for you at the end of the day is give you really good predictions, right? But predictions are only half of what you need. You also need judgment on top of that. And so to the extent that AI is lowering the cost of the prediction, a complimentary like judgment actually becomes even more valuable in that world. And so companies really need to be thoughtful about, again, what do they feel comfortable with and where are their opportunities for them to kind of layer on that higher order judgment to what these machines in essence can do for you.

John Jantsch (17:47): Yeah. I’ve actually, I’ve late been, I don’t, at least the technology I’m working with, I don’t feel like it’s artificial intelligence. I kind of switch it around and say it’s ia, it’s informed automation, right? Is is kind of what I feel like it, at least for our uses in the marketing industry currently. Give me, I, and you already kind of alluded to the fact that this was a hard one to, to do, but I I was gonna ask you for some examples of companies that you think are at least doing, maybe they haven’t, like hit some big home run, you know, here, but, or at least approaching the thoughtfulness of this in, in a way that you think is appropriate.

Mike Lenox (18:24): Well, I’ll give you a historical example that has arguably transformed themselves two, maybe three times as someone like ibm, right? You know, who, who, who went from originally making business machines to making computers, to them being more of a software and services company who tried to embrace AI and the, like

John Jantsch (18:42): Early on with Watson really was kind of one of the original, uh, models, wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah,

Mike Lenox (18:48): Yeah. Exactly. And we can debate whether they’re, you know, well positioned now moving forward, right? Uh, but again, they’ve done a fairly good job kind of repositioning themselves, uh, over the years. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:58): Awesome. Well, Mike, I appreciate you showing up and spending a little time, uh, uh, with my listeners on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where certainly they can get a copy of strategy in the digital age or connect with you in any way that you wanna invite them.

Mike Lenox (19:12): Yeah, absolutely. Of course, you can get it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble or any really online, uh, retailers. The book is coming out from Stanford University Press, uh, so you can of course look forward from them as well. Uh, and then on a personal note, I’m, I’m easy to reach at just simply michaellenox.com, uh, just one n in Lenox there. Uh, and, and that’s another way you can engage and, and connect with me.

John Jantsch (19:33): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a little time out of your day and, uh, hopefully we’ll run it into you one of these days out there on the road.

Mike Lenox (19:39): Well, thank you so much for having me, John.

John Jantsch (19:41): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Andrew Barlos. He’s the head of marketing at Loomly, a leading social media management platform. It’s got a long history of success in the B2B SaaS, software, healthcare, FinTech, human resources consulting and employee benefits technology industries. So, Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Barlos (01:17): Yeah, it’s kind of been a, a diverse background, hopped around a little bit, but I’m stronger because of it. Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:24): You bet. So here the burning question I wanna start out with, is the Loomly icon logo icon a cat or not?

Andrew Barlos (01:32): That’s a great question and something we need to do a better job describing on our website. Probably it’s a double entendre actually. So when Loomly was created, the tagline was a social media manager’s best friend, and that was, you know, obviously a cat that comes across your desk, gets in the way of your camera all the time. So there’s the, the cat icon that kind of symbolizes that we’re your partner on your desk, just like your cat. They’re also two chat bubbles, so just symbolizing, you know, commenting interactions on social media as well.

John Jantsch (02:03): Yeah, awesome. , I knew you’d have an answer, so Yeah,

Andrew Barlos (02:07): ,

John Jantsch (02:08): I’m glad we started there. Yeah. So let’s talk about trends. I guess, you know, when you talk about social media technology in general, I think, you know, things are changing rapidly, uh, for folks, and I think one of the, in fact, one of the biggest frustrations is that, you know, for a lot of businesses, just hard to catch up. So what, uh, if you were gonna list maybe two, three of kind of the hottest things right now, you know, for business use of social media, what would you say those are?

Andrew Barlos (02:36): I, I’d say it, it, it depends where you’re at in the journey. I’d say for a lot of small businesses and growing businesses, number one, overall is the need to build out, not just the social media manager as a, a owner of everything, but also a department there. You can’t expect to grow and manage, like you mentioned, there’s so many updates across all the algorithms, all the different channels that you’re expected to be on. It’s impossible for even one person to manage, let alone a small team. So the number one thing I would say was invest in them, cherish them there. It’s a tough world out there, especially when you’re asked to be, have a consistent presence on eight different social channels. So that’s one overall.

John Jantsch (03:21): Okay.

Andrew Barlos (03:23): The next one is you gotta build in video. Obviously TikTok has proliferated quite a bit. A lot of brands, both large and small, have seen massive success. Even brands that you don’t expect, like the Wall Street Journal mm-hmm. , um, I, I would say video’s definitely not going anywhere. And by all means, we need to focus on short form and long firm video. Find ways to scale that across both YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and all the channels. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:53): All right. So let’s dial back the department thinking for a minute. Let’s say I’m a small business, I don’t even have a marketing department, let alone a social media team. And so I think that, so, so what would be your best advice for somebody like that? Because they just can’t do it all. So, you know, how do they get bang for what little buck they can invest?

Andrew Barlos (04:13): Hmm. Do more with less channels . So don’t try to have that presence across eight different channels. Pick the two or three that are gonna be most actionable, that where your audience is the most, and be great at those. Learn those, understand the algorithms, understand what content works for your audience, and hone in there because there’s no way you’re gonna be able to manage YouTube TikTok if it’s just one person, especially if that person’s not a social media focused role. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:43): So I know the ultimate answer to this next question is, it depends, but would you say that there are, if generically somebody came to you and said, I’m a B2B business, or second person, I’m a B2C business, would you say, oh, well you probably should be focused on these channels. So for b2b, you know, what platforms I should say, should generically say they should be focused on?

Andrew Barlos (05:05): Definitely, uh, uh, the big boys haven’t gone anywhere. You know, Facebook, LinkedIn, specifically for B2B and Instagram. I mean, you could tell most companies, like you need to have a consistent presence there, but that’s changing. You know, more and more B2B businesses are shifting to exploring audiences on TikTok. Mm-hmm. . The other one is, is YouTube too. I, I think just being out there, that’s how people research nowadays is both YouTube and TikTok. So those would be the the second tier that I would get to for most businesses. But as you said, the magic words and marketing is, is, it depends. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:43): So, so b2c, I’m guessing you’re saying same thing, Facebook is still there for them, you know, maybe Twitter’s there for them, but TikTok is certainly, and Instagram are both channels that they need to be really exploring all the various ways to create content.

Andrew Barlos (05:57): Yep, absolutely. If you’re not, if you’re a B2C company and you’re not leveraging short form video on Instagram and TikTok, you, you, uh, drop everything and, and start that now. And, you know, I I, that’s intimidating and I’m not a outward facing guy, you know, I don’t wanna be the, the face and and record videos as we hired an excellent social media manager who started to produce some great results for Loomly. But the good thing is nowadays, it doesn’t have to be that intimidating. It’s all about authenticity. Yeah. And just being yourself and telling your story and what performs better on those platforms is actually not this great production value video. People wanna connect with your story and who you really are. So that’s tough to do sometimes to be vulnerable like that. Yeah. But the good thing is it’s, you know, anybody can do it.

John Jantsch (06:47): Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. I, I’ve noticed that across the board even on, excuse me, even on, you know, you’re like lead magnets, you know, you’re trying to get somebody to opt in for something almost today. It needs to look like an internal, you know, internal like process document or something, as opposed to this polished, glossy thing. Cuz people are thinking, oh, that’s, you know, I can just, that’s like behind the scenes something I can grab that’s not like something you produced.

Andrew Barlos (07:11): Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point with , even with, uh, downloadable, right? Yeah. It’s something that’s gonna be actionable and, you know, I wanna hear from a human and not a brand and I wanna hear stories not be sold to. So anybody that’s starting out with short form video or start investing in Instagram reels and tos, definitely do not just start selling. You have to build trust first and build an audience and then work in your product or, or service as you go.

John Jantsch (07:39): And, and I think certainly most people would suggest that is absolutely true. And yet, you know, there are a lot of brands that are looking at social media as a new lead gen channel. Would you say that, would you say that? Well, the answer is definitely yes. It can be a lead gen channel . But what you started to allude to first, there was, you know, you know, you almost get permission to do lead gen, thereby your earlier actions, don’t you?

Andrew Barlos (08:07): Great. It’s like any brand building, you know, you need to establish trust first before you start asking for them to convert. And, uh, you can’t ask for a conversion on a first touch. You know, one thing, once you have a library of org of different types of organic content that you’ve tested, video, graphics, carousels, whatever it may be, once you know it works organically with your audience, that’s what you take and then turn into a high performing ad. So those are the posts that you boost, those are the types of content that you scale and then put those into your ad uh, campaigns. The organic data is the best type of data because, you know, obviously you haven’t paid to get it yet. So that’s what we’ve started to do is, you know, do, even if it’s something simple, like let’s say you’re a solopreneur or a small business and you don’t have the whole ads campaign set up and multiple team members to run it, we picked like a few high performing organic posts and just boost those in TikTok and Instagram and you know, that’s a great way to expand your audience with stuff, you know, it’s gonna work.

John Jantsch (09:12): So, so there’s one, uh, school of thought that says really social media is more what marketers call top of the funneling. You know, it’s where you get exposure or it’s where people come to know about you. For some people that’s not enough, you know, because they need some sort of result today. So what do you know, how do you advise people get into and use social media with sort of the realization that it’s not necessarily going to produce immediate measurable roi?

Andrew Barlos (09:41): Right. It’s a long-term game. And if you’re not ready to, that’s where it’s difficult. You know, I led off by saying hire social media manager best in that team. It’s difficult too, cause it’s not a one-to-one roi, but if you’re looking to build a successful brand over time and not have to have, you know, each conversion, each lead be paid and build that organic presence, just like a content strategy, you need to have social media content over years, you know, months and years at every level of the funnel too. So obviously brand awareness is number one, but then, you know, you loop in some converting content as well, similar to any other content strategy.

John Jantsch (10:23): So you, I think just about at the top, talked about video, almost all of the platforms now are, you know, have some, you know, some way in which you can post videos. So would it be fair to say that’s the content format that everybody should lean into the most?

Andrew Barlos (10:41): I, I wouldn’t say the most. Cause it, again, it depends, right? , but I would say with each platform, prioritizing video overall in some form or another, you’d be smart about when you create video content. Mm-hmm. . So batch it, film as much as you can at once and then break it up. Take an Instagram reel, repurpose for TikTok, repurpose for YouTube short. That’s something that we’ve done. We’ve seen a lot of success with lummis account is just posting frequently on YouTube shorts and we’ve seen a lot more exposure there. So I’d say definitely work it into your overall social media strategy if you haven’t focused on it enough cause and be smart about repurposing it. But overall test all types of different content. You know, stories, reels, carousels, you know, continue to test as many different types and push yourself to experiment as much as possible across the board. Cause it’s, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to social content.

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(13:34): So here’s a question that I’m sure nobody has asked you. What role is AI playing today in social media? Content production, scheduling, hashtagging, I mean, all the various components. It seems like it’s crept in largely and there’s two, two camps. I think there’s the one that’ss like, oh, it’ll do it all for us. And then the one, you know, the other camp that’s, it’s a research assistant, so, you know. Yep. I’d love your thoughts on where you see it today and maybe where you see it going.

Andrew Barlos (14:06): Well, yeah, it, it’s incredible and it’s, you know, what I say today may not be relevant a week from now with how fast things are advancing. Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m kind of in between the two camps. I think from a social media perspective, there’s lots of things that it can help get you jumpstarted on. You know, the easy one is caption writing, right? Mm-hmm. , write me 50 tweets about social media. You’ll get some stuff you could work off of, especially with the free, if we’re talking about ChatGPT, the free version, the pay versions a lot more enhanced, a lot more in depth that we haven’t explored a ton. But I, I think right now it can get you a, a good part of the way there. It can spark ideas, right? And you take that and then put your own personal touch on it.

(14:49): So I get a couple ideas for a format of a blog or an email or a social post. Then I take those ideas, okay? That’s how I can structure my thoughts. The number one thing I keep preaching those authenticity do not, I would not recommend any form of AI content to be your all in strategy and just do that. Close your eyes and let that go because it’s gonna be generic inherently, you know, but it’s definitely a tool that anybody in marketing and social media should be experimenting with. And I know, you know, that’s something that we’re looking into across the board. You know, number one, caption writing, again, like it pretty straightforward thing, but there’s all different types of research listening, other types of ways AI can be applied, which we’re really excited about.

John Jantsch (15:35): So one of the uses that I think is very effective right now is kind of working backwards, taking content that is already been well written, well researched in your voice and ask it to extract, you know, from that or to rewrite for a shorter format or something like that. And so it’s, you’re not gonna get the clumsy generic stuff as much because you’ve already, you know, you’ve really fed it great content already to, to extract. We take, you know, we’ll have somebody do an interview, you know, testimonials, you know, that kind of stuff. And it’ll be 10 minutes of them just babbling and we’ll say, you know, get me a couple great quotes out of this. And it, yeah, I could go through it and do it too , but it does it in 10 seconds. So that’s how we’re using it right now. Is it just, it’s like an assistant in a lot of ways to make you more efficient.

Andrew Barlos (16:22): Yep, a hundred percent. It’s a great way to repurpose content. You have a strong blog, white paper, whatever, like turn this into however many social posts. Yep, absolutely.

John Jantsch (16:32): So let’s pause on, on the conversation, uh, from my end and just maybe give, uh, you know, a minute or two about, not a pitch for Loomly necessarily, but just like, yeah, here’s what Loomly does that Sure. You know, that, that are kind of the core features and, and how people use it.

Andrew Barlos (16:51): Sure, yeah, absolutely. So Loomly’s a all in one, easy to use social media management platform where you can upload your social media assets, create review, optimize your posts, schedule them, and then automatically post them to all your social accounts. So we talked about having to manage eight different accounts. I don’t know how anybody does it without a scheduling tool like Loomly, especially when you wanna push for post consistency. What Loomly does a little bit differently is we were actually built as an agency to client, um, a collaboration tool. So with custom workflows, review process, approval process and custom user roles, that made us a really great tool for agencies, large teams. But at the same time as they built out the scheduling and calendar component, it was very simple, easy to use, no bells and whistles, but any client, even small businesses or non-experts can adopt it. So it’s great for small businesses, small teams too. And so, you know, we’ve grown quite a bit with a very, you know, lean team and we’re super customer-centric and that, that feedback loop we’ve established with our customers to, for them to vote on different features has really driven a lot of what we’ve done with our product and a lot of our success.

John Jantsch (18:15): How is that feature request that actually shocks the client if they don’t approve quickly? Is that coming along

Andrew Barlos (18:22): ? Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, we, you know, we, we do what we can, you know, and, and, but I think, uh, a lot of times, even with a a relatively smaller team, we, we do delight, uh, when we can. And, and even if it’s a couple, if it’s a quick win or something, we do try to jump on it, but it’s been so good at helping us analyze trends and make sure that what we’re focusing on is actually what our customers want, at the same time adding in new innovative features that we see in the market.

John Jantsch (18:54): So talk to me a little bit about the scheduling, uh, feature. And I do, uh, I, I appreciate completely that, you know, you can write a month’s worth of content cuz that’s what you do on, you know, Monday or Tuesday or whatever of, of the month. And then, you know, you put it out there and you know, it posts on the date. Is there any, is there any sense that feature by itself or that practice by itself, you know, is hurting people’s authenticity or maybe even algorithms within, you know, within the, you know, various platforms?

Andrew Barlos (19:25): Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s been a couple studies, there’s been some anecdotal things like, hey, you know, why aren’t my schedule posts performing as well? There’s also been anecdotes where my schedule posts perform better, and there’s been a couple studies out there that showed there wasn’t a direct correlation and we haven’t seen that across the board, but obviously there’s so many other variables. What are you posting? You know, did you post bland content and schedule bland content? It’s not gonna perform what, in some cases where it can help is what Loomly provides a post inspiration. We’ve just kind of re refreshed that, uh, frequently just to give ideas for different types of content. Like I said, it’s so important to figure out what works, but then there’s also post optimization tips. So like, Hey, make sure this is a little long. Make sure this video’s trimmed, make sure you focus on this.

(20:11): So those reminders, especially across each different platform, uh, can go a long way to, to optimizing, uh, content. But you know what, how I kinda like ai, you know, I wouldn’t say schedule every single post. You know, for example, Twitter, it’s very much a real time platform if you think of, so an idea, you should get it out there and jump on it quickly that day. Yeah. But what it can do is take 50, 60% the schedule, post the brand post what you know is gonna be out there, get that off your plate, and then a social media manager or a marketer can focus on what really you going in social media with, which is like real-time interactions with your audience. Yeah. Talk, meet them where they’re at, comment on things, follow hashtags, and jump in on the conversation and then research, you know, see what your competitors are doing, see what people are talking about, and then you have more time to reinvest that into your strategy.

John Jantsch (21:07): You know, it’s interesting, one of the things we’ve seen with our clients is that, you know, obviously they wanna promote their business objectives in social media, but mm-hmm. , you know, when the boss has a new baby and they take a picture of the baby in the office for the first time, the the engagement blows up. . And I really try to, uh, encourage our clients post about 50 50 post as much culture stuff as you can because that’s gonna make your business objective stuff do better.

Andrew Barlos (21:31): Yep. A hundred percent. You know, like I said, it’s a, a massive research tool just as much as Google search. You know, it’s funny, we’ll look through our, our attribution software and I’ll see all the touches and it’ll start, it’ll go blog, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, you know, sign up, Facebook, Instagram, and then they convert. And it’s, you know, people again, they, like you said, that human authentic content, people wanna work with people. They don’t wanna work with a generic brand. So that definitely goes a long way.

John Jantsch (22:05): Uh, awesome. Andrew, thank you so much for taking some time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to invite people where they might, uh, find you connect with you and I bet you even have a trial of Loomly.

Andrew Barlos (22:16): Oh yeah, ab, absolutely. Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. It’s been fun. You could start a free trial of Loomly @loomly.com. It’s a full feature trial so you can test everything out, see which plan works for you, uh, follow. We’re either at Loomly or at Loomly Social across all the platforms. And I’m on LinkedIn at Andrew Barlos if you wanna chat with me anytime. Awesome.

John Jantsch (22:37): All right. Well, again, thanks for taking a little time out of your day to chat with our listeners and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Andrew Barlos (22:45): Sounds great. Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (22:46): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Russell Henneberry. He is a digital marketing consultant, speaker and co-author of Digital Marketing for Dummies. He’s the founder of theCLIKK an email newsletter about digital marketing. Russ also consults and trains employees of companies through his digital advisor program. So Russ, thanks and welcome to the show.

Russell Henneberry (01:20): Hey, thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (01:22): It’s in honor. So do you go by Russell or Russ, or Depends on who you’re talking to.

Russell Henneberry (01:26): It doesn’t matter, but most people call me Russ, but Russ. Okay.

John Jantsch (01:29): There are

Russell Henneberry (01:29): Several people.

John Jantsch (01:30): Then I just jumped right into it. . All right. I mentioned that you have a successful newsletter called theCLIKK, so I thought that we’d talk about newsletters. Newsletters have been around for ages. I’ve been putting one out at least for 20 years, myself, . How have, and I know that you’ve studied, you know, we are, we are alluding to some of the old timers before we got on the air here, you know, how have you seen newsletters evolve? Because I think they were in the, in sort of phase one of digital marketing. They were kind of a standard tool, but then social media came along and other stuff came along. They fell out of favor. Now they seem to be really back in favor. What do you see happening in the space in general?

Russell Henneberry (02:10): Well, what I see right now is a return to, to email newsletters. They’re hot right now. Yeah. And you know, I think of email as this intersection of content marketing and sort of direct response promotion, right? Email is still a great place to make and probably the best place to make a direct call to action, which is sort of frowned upon most of the time in social. But when you can take the, the email and turn it into content, right? So you’re not just continuously pounding your email list with promotions, you can get this sort of best of both worlds where you get that engagement that you get from content marketing plus the bonus, uh, big bonus of being able to make direct calls to action.

John Jantsch (02:58): Yeah, I mean, I started mine, you know, to share, educate, you know, build trust, all those things. But let’s face it, it was a way to build an email list. I, I literally remember people, you know, 20 years ago saying, oh, I got your newsletter, you know, , I’m so excited. I mean, it was, cuz that was before we got tons and tons of email every day. Right. So, in terms of how, I mean, I think I look at your newsletter, I subscribe to your newsletter and it is pretty classic format in terms of education. There’s not any new crazy technology necessarily that’s showcased there, but I know it works. I mean, I’m just looking at some of your statistics. I know it works for you. Before we go into that, you know, LinkedIn has newsletters. Now, you know, there are people putting newsletters behind paywalls. Do you see those as approaches that will, you know, be with us, you know, for a long time because it’s very curated content? Or do you think the kind of the classic approach that you take, you know, is still valid today, obviously?

Russell Henneberry (04:00): Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I, I’ve looked at moving my newsletter over to things like CK Yeah. Or moving into LinkedIn and publishing there. Personally, I wanna be able to control that technology because I wanna be able to do some other things with it. And I’m not afraid to mess around that technology. But I think the barrier to entry into starting a newsletter because of things like subs and then the competitor there, beehive is also something to look at. If you’re looking at starting a newsletter, the guy who I believe was in charge of li growth at Marketing Brew or Morning Brew started beehive. So there’s some really great out the box options there. I like to have more control over, over everything. Yeah. So I end up with, you know, sort of that patchwork of tools. But yeah, I mean, um, getting into the newsletter business is easier than ever today.

John Jantsch (04:51): Yeah. Yeah. So, so getting subscribers, you know, is one piece of it, but then keeping them, because it’s worth reading, right? Is obviously a huge part of this. What’s your editorial strategy? I’m curious, how do you decide, I’m sure you don’t wake up on Monday and go, here’s what I’m gonna write about.

Russell Henneberry (05:09): Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, so the content marketing side of the editorial strategy, I’m always in all the top of funnel content and, and sort of mid-funnel content that I produce. I’m looking to either educate, inspire, or entertain. And I do try to get a little bit, you know, witty inside of there. And I have some editors that do a pretty good job of helping me not tell too many dad jokes in there . But, but yeah, I mean, my goal when I talk to my editors when I think about my own stuff is that I want to give you something educational, but I wanna do it with a spoon full of sugar. So, and that’s that entertainment sort of, don’t take myself too seriously angle. I think we see a lot of that cuz you know, I’m competing against other publishers like say, like Digit Day or Ad Age or something like that, that are probably a little bit more buttoned up. And so, you know, if you like my style and you know, then you know, you’re gonna read my stuff and you’re gonna anticipate my stuff coming into your inbox.

John Jantsch (06:12): So you didn’t say it as directly as this, but I mean, I think certainly a best practice would be have a voice of some sort, right? Yes. That is, that’s going to either repel people or attract people ,

Russell Henneberry (06:23): Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a good way to think about this is, you know, an exercise you can do when you’re looking for a voice is you can say to yourself, I want to be the blank of blank. Right? Right. Yeah. So you, if you know what niche that you’re in, let’s say you’re gonna be creating a gardening newsletter, you know, you might say, I wanna be, I wanna be the,

John Jantsch (06:42): I wanna be the Seinfeld of gardening newsletter, , Jerry,

Russell Henneberry (06:45): Jerry Seinfeld of gardening or whatever, of gardening. Right? So, and that can help you start to box out what maybe you’re looking for from a voice perspective.

John Jantsch (06:53): Yeah. What would Jerry say, right? So you threw out the terms top of funnel, middle of the funnel. Maybe explain kind of how you differentiate your content based on maybe where somebody is in a potential buying situation.

Russell Henneberry (07:07): Yeah. Well, and, and we were talking about this before you hit record. We were talking about, you know, you know, newsletters are a great way to build trust and they’re a great way to, to connect with people. You know, you’re right there in their inbox and, you know, you do that consistently over time. You’re gonna build that know, like, and trust, but it’s still, you know, making a, a really high ticket offer, like is tough to do in an email. So I’m, I’m typically looking to get people to engage with my content and then I’m gonna ask them to do, so, for example, last week, I, I ran an article and then I said, if you’d like me to shoot you a little video to expand on this and show you some examples, click this link and I’ll tag you in my system or whatever.

(07:47): And then I’ll, so then I shot a Loom video and I sent that out just to people that, that were tagged and, and, and had asked for it. And then inside that video, you know, I make a call to action, you know, for a service or a product Yeah. Or a force or whatever that I’m looking to do. But I only wanna do that with people that are really engaged. Right? Yeah. The strongest parts of my list. It’s sort of that whole, you know, don’t ask somebody to marry you on the first date type Yeah. Thing where, you know, we wanna kind of build up that no, like, and trust with people over time.

John Jantsch (08:19): Y you know, and you make a great point because I, I, I think a lot of people, you know, they have the, that you just said a high ticket item, let’s guess at a price, $9,700, you know? Yeah. Thing. And the idea that somebody’s gonna read a newsletter, I mean, they might, if they’ve been following you for years, they’ve decided time’s. Right. But the idea that somebody’s gonna click on a button and buy something like that, you know, it really needs to be much more of a dance to get there, doesn’t it?

Russell Henneberry (08:42): For sure. You know, I, whenever I’m talking to anybody in, in my consulting work about what they’re selling, I, I try to immediately put it in one of two buckets. I’m, look, I’m putting it in, I can close this deal on a webpage bucket. Yeah, yeah. Or I put it in the, I gotta get this person on the phone bucket. And if it’s a phone bucket, which if you’re hitting that 10 K mark, that’s phone bucket for me. Like, you’re gonna need to get somebody on the phone, there’s gonna need to be a sales process and so forth. You might be able to close that on online de depending, but probably not. And so, you know, those kinds of calls to action are difficult to make in a newsletter. And so what I like to do with that is, you know, you’re trying to nurture people towards a phone consultation or, and that takes a lot of touch points.

John Jantsch (09:26): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you like overpromise something, you can’t actually deliver, you know,

Russell Henneberry (09:32): , there’s that

John Jantsch (09:34): . So, so we’re waiting into monetization. How do you think, actually, let me back up before I ask that question. I want to ask a broader question. Did you, was there a point in time where you said, I’m gonna go all in on newsletter, this is, you know, this is how it’s going to fit my business model? Or was it, did it start more as Yeah, this is a normal standard digital marketing tactic?

Russell Henneberry (09:55): Yeah. So I kind of did go all in as, so we are email first, right? Yeah. So, you know, I like to think, when I’m thinking content marketing, I think about where’s the genesis of this content going to be? And I, I think podcasts, by the way, are a wonderful place to, to, uh, create original content and that’s where it’s born. And then you can hand that out to writers, for example, and have them chop that up into pieces and go out to social with it and cut the video up and different things like that. Right? And my newsletter is that for me, so I, I produce original content only there in that newsletter, and then that stuff is then chopped up and cut up and put into different places. So the reason I did that is because, you know, I was spending a lot of time thinking, well, how am I gonna get this person from social media onto my email list and how am I gonna get this person from listening to this over here?

(10:43): And I’m from this YouTube video and from my website. And I said, well, why don’t I just start there? You know, like, why don’t I just start with them on the email, uh, list and focus all the attention there, and then I can move them out from there. So, you know, just like you could do with a podcast, just like you could do with a YouTube channel, it’s just, you know, where are you producing that original material? And then you can then kind of go and do what you want with it from there. And a lot of times you can hire somebody to go do a lot of it from there.

John Jantsch (11:10): So, so again, now as I allude to monetization, do you, maybe I’ll just let you as, as much as you’re comfortable sharing about all the ways you think about monetizing, and I know there are some very direct ways that you do it, but I’d love to hear kind of your theory on that.

Russell Henneberry (11:27): Well, I like to keep it diversified because, you know, things go up and down. So, for example, I sell advertising and it’s very easy to sell advertising in the fourth quarter because everybody’s fleeing Facebook and Google for cheaper clicks elsewhere because of, you know, all the retail, you know, ads are cranking up prices and things like that. Yeah. It does it for me, advertising can be kind of seasonal. So I also sell trainings and courses. I use it to fill my consulting work, right. When, you know, if I need a consulting client, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start working towards that through, through that list. And so yeah, it’s advertising, it’s consulting and some info products like courses and so

John Jantsch (12:12): Forth. Yeah. So, so if I’m a potential advertiser, I’m guessing top of funnel ads, , like list building ads give away, you know, a great resource ebook, lead magnet kind of ads are really what work in a newsletter like yours, aren’t they?

Russell Henneberry (12:28): I think it’s the, when I speak to advertisers, I advise them to try to move people from my list onto theirs because people that are reading my newsletter have shown that they use email as a source of information. Yeah. So it’s smart for them, in my opinion, to use a lead magnet offer or a webinar offer or something like that can move them into that person’s email list because that person is an email reader. But we do get a lot of advertisers that know we wanna go straight for a free trial or we wanna go straight into an offer or something like that. And we’ll do that too. But absolutely love the, and we, we see great response from people that give out a solid high value lead magnet to my list.

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(14:11): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. Let’s talk about metrics, again, going back to when I started, I remember 83, 80 4% open rates, , those days don’t exist for anybody today. But what are some of the metrics that that the, not just that you should be tracking, but that show like you’re doing things right?

Russell Henneberry (15:18): Well, so when you start to get involved in buying traffic to get subscribers, it could, it becomes pretty important that you’re buying subscribers that are opening, because, especially if you’re selling ads because Yeah. You know, think about it. Like you might be measuring, for example, your cost per lead and it might be, let’s say at a satisfactory $4 per lead. But then you’re finding that these, that, you know, these leads are only opening at 30%. Well, you know, the, are they really only $4 leads when you’re only getting three out of 10 to open? So it really is important to be watching the quality of the subscribers that you’re getting and whether they’re opening and it might be worth paying six or $8 for a subscriber that will open. Right. And so I do love the idea when you’re using, when you’re running a newsletter of advertising in other newsletters, because again, that person’s shown the propensity to read newsletters and use email as a source of information.

(16:13): Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean it’s the classic ones. Open rates, click rates, cost per lead if you’re buying traffic. I also look at sort of the virality, like how can I take any subscriber that maybe I’ve bought right at $4 or $6 or whatever and turn that into 1.5 subscribers. Right. So I can get them to spread the word. Yeah. And get me. So, you know, and that cuts my, if I can get one every one person to bring somebody else, then I cuts my lead costs in half. And there’s some cool tools out there that can be used to do that.

John Jantsch (16:48): A viral referral tool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Russell Henneberry (16:50): Yeah. Up viral is a cool one that works really well to get people to share and, you know, using a unique link and then you can kind of reward them with more content, things like that.

John Jantsch (17:02): Do, do you, let’s talk about list building then. O obviously, you know, the, a lot of this, a lot of your success, a lot of your ability to sell ads, , a lot of your ability to have reach, you know, is that you’re getting subscribers. So do you, what’s kind of your approach or what approach might you recommend to somebody, uh, to build a list?

Russell Henneberry (17:21): Well, so, you know, when I started out I said I wanna build a list that advertisers will find attractive, right? Yeah. So that’s where I kind of, where my brain started. So that comes out to your ad targeting that you’re gonna use when you buy traffic. So I was looking to build a list of people that are doing marketing work for other people. So they’re either agency workers or freelancers, right? Because software companies and service companies, oftentimes these people very valuable. Yeah. A software company especially where they can roll, if they can get an agency to adopt their tool and roll it to all their clients, that’s a big client for them. So we set out to build that list and that’s who’s on this list, right? So Yeah. And it’s all comes down to your targeting and it that, that that particular subscriber might cost you more. You might be able to go find other people that would want to read the same content for cheaper, but Yeah. Is that what your advertisers want? And I think if you’re gonna sell advertising, you need to be thinking about building a valuable list, not just any old list. Yeah,

John Jantsch (18:26): Yeah, yeah, yeah. AB absolutely. Well, and also if you know the diversification you wanna sell to that list, they should be people that are obviously interested in what you’re selling. So, so you do recommend buying subscribers, so to speak, or buying at least traffic that you hope to turn into subscribers?

Russell Henneberry (18:43): Yeah, I mean, if you wanna advertise, I think you need to hit that 10 K subscriber mark before they start getting interested. You gotta remember that you’re dealing with advertisers that could just go into Facebook and, and access a limitless Yeah. Nearly limitless. Yeah. Group of people. So there’s an unlimited scale, in other words, inside these other platforms. And so you gotta have at least some scale in order for them to take a look. So I, I do like the idea if you’ve got your advertising packages in place and you’re able to do it, but I don’t recommend that you start there, right? So with advertisers, your monetization model, I would encourage people to, especially if you’re just getting started to, to sell services or information products, until you can get to that, you know, cuz you’re gonna wanna, unless you’re funded and you’ve got a giant dumpster of cash that you wanna burn, you’re probably gonna need to be roi. If you’re buying traffic, you need to be ROI it a little bit faster, you know? And so you can’t just sit here and build up until you hit 10 K and then start selling advertising. So I would recommend that you sell either e even physical products Yeah. But physical products or info products or services until you hit that 10 K mark. And then you can add that, start adding in that advertising revenue.

John Jantsch (20:00): So over the years, I, I actually sell sponsorships. It’s just kind of a package with our podcast and things like that. But I’ve always felt like, well now I have a personal relationship with my subscribers, you know, they really see it as me. And a lot of that is on the trust that I don’t try to shove stupid stuff down their throat. So do you sometimes find yourself really having to, you know, there we have turned away sponsors because we’re like, no , and I mean, they’re obvious ones, but even sometimes where we just don’t feel like that’s a very good tool or a very good resource we’ll say. No. So do, do you feel like you have a different relationship as an advertiser because of the relationship with your readers?

Russell Henneberry (20:43): Well, I turn people down all the time and it’s because it’s just, you know, I’m the end decision maker on all that, right? So I can, but I can see how larger publications must have a battle between editorial and Yeah. And monetization, right? Because you do get people that want to just put your stuff in front and you don’t, and you, you could just take their money and put it in front of people. But I know that’s not the good long-term strategy for my business is not to just shove things on their throat. And I can always, if I don’t have an ad to run that I, like, I can, I just run my own stuff, you know? Mm-hmm. , this is sponsored by this course or this, you know, yeah. Whatever this event that I’m going to or whatever. Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:23): All right. So I’m gonna end on the question that, you know, we could have spent the whole time talking about, um, , but I’ve been throwing this into pretty much, uh, any conversation, especially about content, but ai, how has that impacted your, you know, your thoughts about, you know, producing content?

Russell Henneberry (21:42): Well, you know, obviously things are shifting daily with this, so check the date on this podcast because right? You know, you know, it depends, but like, yeah, what I’m seeing now is every tool that I use is getting is, is overlaying on top of ChatGPT. And so I am using AI every day. The way I use it for content creation is typically for things that would’ve maybe taken me a half hour. For example, I was, I won’t go into why, but I was, I needed to be, have the details of Dwight Eisenhower’s career for a little article I was writing, and I just popped it into ChatGPT I was like, you know, gimme a bulleted list of Dwight Eisenhower’s and, and it was like done, right? And I, right, right. Because it wasn’t, you know, completely crucial that was even correct.

(22:32): A hundred percent. I just popped it in there, right? I, you know, I didn’t even check the information. It all lucked pretty, right? So I popped it in there, and if somebody would’ve come back and said, actually he didn’t start the highway program or something, he did this, that would’ve been like, well, that wasn’t really the point of the article, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m using it for stuff like that. I do come down on the side right now that if you are creating, if you’re not creating content that’s better than what ChatGPT can put out, you shouldn’t be creating content. Like, you’re probably not getting any traction anyway. It, it does lack voice now. I mean, you can get some pretty incredible stuff out of it, but still, in fact, at the top of my newsletter, uh, what I’ve been doing, just to be sort of cheeky, is like today, I, I just finished it up and I said, this newsletter was written by a human with real arms and legs and everything, you know, and I, I do see, uh, a world where it’s going to have value for you to state that you have chosen to, to continue to write or produce your content yourself.

(23:34): I think there’ll be other places where people are gonna be tolerant of what, I don’t care if that’s a bot that wrote that, or a person, but other places where we are going to find a lot of value in the fact that someone is writing this is a real human and, uh, with experiences and memories and thoughts and all those things.

John Jantsch (23:52): Yeah. Well, I, I’ve definitely am telling people that if you, you can’t ignore it or, or you won’t be able to compete, but it we’re definitely a long way. I, in fact, I don’t even think it’s artificial intelligence. I’ve been kind of jokingly switching it around and calling it ia. It’s informed automation is what I really think it is. And just as your example, I mean, imagine if you were trying to come up with a killer headline and you had three or four people sitting around and you all brainstormed it, well, that’s the way that I use, you know, ChatGPT is, it’s like, yeah, make this headline better. Gimme 10 ideas. And it’s like, there might be one word that I go, yes, , that’s the word. Exactly. But, you know, that’s really how I use it almost as a research assistant.

Russell Henneberry (24:31): Yeah. I mean, it’s open on my desktop right now, and I will, yeah. Yeah. I, I can’t see myself going away from using it anytime soon. It’s here to stay so it can’t be ignored. But you know, you know, you and I have both been doing this a long time, so we’ve seen people try to take things like this and look for a shortcut build, you know, maybe, I’m sure there’s people building giant, you know, content filled websites with AI content in them. And I’ve been doing it long enough to know that in the long run, it’s not gonna be a sustainable business model.

John Jantsch (25:05): Well, and what I love is the Make Seven Figures as an AI consultant courses that are being sold right now, too. . Yeah.

Russell Henneberry (25:14): They’re everywhere.

John Jantsch (25:15): , but such as life. All right. Well Russ, thanks so much for dropping by and kinda sharing some of your knowledge on the newsletter. TheCLIKK we’ll have, uh, how to subscribe in the show notes, but, uh, certainly any, anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you,

Russell Henneberry (25:31): Well yeah, just come over to the newsletter, theclikk.com and subscribe and then say hello. You can always reply cuz I read all the replies to, to my emails. And then if you wanna connect me on social media, I’m Russ Henneberry on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (25:46): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a moment out of your day to share with our listeners and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Russell Henneberry (25:53): Yeah, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

John Jantsch (25:55): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.