Monthly Archives: February 2020

Transcript of Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content

Transcript of Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Melanie Deziel. She is the Founder of StoryFuel, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today called, The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas for Marketers and Creators.

John Jantsch: So Melanie, welcome to the show.

Melanie Deziel: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Is this your first book?

Melanie Deziel: It is my first book.

John Jantsch: Awesome.

Melanie Deziel: It’s very exciting stuff.

John Jantsch: It’s very exciting. Have you got finished copies, yet?

Melanie Deziel: I have not, they are in the mail. I’m waiting, the bated breath, checking the mail a little obsessively. Any day, now.

John Jantsch: It’s a pretty awesome feeling, I will tell you.

Melanie Deziel: It will be really nice, to see them live and in person.

John Jantsch: I’m going to ask you lots of really easy, nice softball questions, but I’m going to start with kind of a hard one.

Melanie Deziel: Okay.

John Jantsch: There’s a lot of books about stories right now, so what’s your focus?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah.

John Jantsch: I’m going to use that word again … for this book, that’s going to make it different from the other books out there about story telling?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, you’re totally right. Storytelling is a bit of a buzzword at this particular moment, everyone’s trying to figure out their story and how to tell it.

Melanie Deziel: My approach is a little bit different in that I’m not coming at you, talking about your brand’s story as a whole, right? This is not who you are, as a company. This is, very specifically, how do you take that message and bring it to the world? The framework that I’m sharing is something that I learned in my background as a journalist, which is also, probably, a different perspective than a lot of the storytelling books out there. Just sharing, how do I sit down and come up with content on a recurring basis? There are so many platforms, and you have to update all of them so frequently, you run out things to say.

Melanie Deziel: So, the goal of this book was really to say you don’t have to be this amazing, magical, prolific content creator to have something unique to say routinely. And that if you have a system behind how you choose what to say, you’ll actually be able to fill those platforms with ease. You’ll have hundreds of ideas, rather than this writer’s block of what should I post today? That’s the question I’m trying to eliminate.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you said that because, my experience working with a lot of journalists, now that we’re all producing all this content, is that this idea, the training really was a system, because a lot of times you got assigned something you knew nothing about. Your system had to kick into place, to allow you to structure it, format it, get it going quickly, on deadline. I think that makes a ton of sense.

Melanie Deziel: 100%. The other thing I always say is, you never see a newspaper that says, “Sorry, we decided not to do a paper today, because there was nothing new to talk about,” right? That deadline pressure is real, so you become very skilled at always finding a new angle, a new perspective, a new approach, something that you can say. So that even if it’s yet another school board meeting, or whatever else you happen to be covering that day, you’ve got some new way to talk about it that’s going to engage people.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Unfortunately, that also produces the stories of the doctor who talks about more people having a heart attack in Kansas City, during the Super Bowl, because they had to fill space, right?

Melanie Deziel: It’s true, it’s true. Well, you never want to make content just for the sake of content, so hopefully this will help you come up with a lot of ideas, and then choose the best ones to bring to life.

John Jantsch: We can drill into some of the elements, but I guess it might be helpful if you have the one minute version of the global picture, of what the framework is?

Melanie Deziel: Absolutely. The framework proposes two things.

Melanie Deziel: One, that every piece of content you’ve ever created, loved, or consumed is only made up of two things. It has a focus, in that it’s about something. Maybe it’s about people, or history, or data. And it has a format, so it’s brought to life in some way, like writing, audio, like we’re doing here, video, et cetera. As long as you agree with that, that every piece of content has a focus and a format, then what I’m proposing is if I can give you a tool belt of these are some focuses, and these are some formats, you can start to come up with new and novel combinations of those things, that allow you to tell similar stories in new ways.

Melanie Deziel: The idea being you could tell a story about history through a timeline, instead of just through a written piece of content. Or, instead of just through a video, or instead of just through an infographic. So, talking about new and different ways to combine all these different focuses, and formats. That’s really what we’re trying to do, is give you a go-to system, and a language for talking about, and thinking about content creation, so that you’re not just trying to grab things out of thin air.

John Jantsch: When I hear you talk about the focus piece, are you saying every piece of content has to have one focus? Your business has to have an over-arching focus? I mean, drill down on the focus idea?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, absolutely. I think that you can certainly combine these focuses, but the idea is if you were to think about a particular piece of content that you really enjoyed, like maybe the Serial podcast. We all remember Serial, that was a big one, we went crazy for it. That was a story about people, and it was a story about the history of that particular case, right? It did combine both the people and the history, as the focus. And it was told through audio, so that’s the particular combinations of focuses and format, there.

Melanie Deziel: You can imagine a world where that was a really long, investigative written piece, and something like the New Yorker instead of being just audio. That would be a different focus. It could have been told through an interactive timeline, where you scrolled through, and you got to listen to audio clips, and see photos. It could have been a map. I think they did, actually, include a lot of supportive content online, there was a map at some point, where you could look, here’s the cell tower, and here’s where the body was found, and plotting out all the different story elements on a map, instead.

Melanie Deziel: Every piece of content you’re trying to come up with … If you have a new product launch, or an event coming up, or you’re trying to just promote your business in general, thinking how could I tell this story through the lens of history? The history of our company, the history of this product. Or, how could I do it through data? As we talk about our company, how many people have we helped, how many products have we sold, how much revenue have we made? It just gives you different prompts, so instead of going back to the same tired stories, maybe you’re approaching things in a new way, or bringing them to life in a new way.

John Jantsch: That makes a ton of sense. Is there a finite collection of focuses? Like, here are the top … I know you talk about 10, but is there ultimately only so many of those that you should try to? I’m sure that certain industries, you could go crazy, but for the most part, would you say that there are a handful of tried and true focuses?

Melanie Deziel: Definitely. I think when it comes to focuses, and formats, I’ve picked 10 because it seemed like a nice, round number that would include some that were familiar, and some that would stretch you, to think and create in new ways. I probably can’t create an exhaustive list. At least, probably not in the timeline that it would take to create a book, there’s limits on our life. But, I did try to present some of the tried and trues.

Melanie Deziel: In terms of focuses, I think people is always a really good one to go for, we relate to stories about people very well. Basic and details, those are two complimentary ones. Basics, approaching something with just the very basics of what you need to know, really educational content. Then, details being more of an in-depth dive. You could do the same story, but approach it in both of those ways, as basics and details. I think process content is really having a moment, the last couple years. So, that’s anything that’s instructions, or DIY, recipes, we’ve seen a lot of that type of content. Those are some of the really common, tried and true.

Melanie Deziel: But, I think this also present some that you may not have thought of. I don’t know how many people are doing opinion content, as a brand. I give some examples in the book of how you can do that, without feeling like you’re going out on a limb, or getting in the middle of a debate. That’s not the goal, we’re not trying to create drama or divide your audience, we just want to express that someone has made a choice in creating this content. Maybe, “My favorite podcasts for entrepreneurs,” as opposed to just, “Here’s 10 random podcasts for entrepreneurs.”

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, those are some of the favorites. Again, like I said, a balance of hopefully ones that are familiar, and ones that might challenge you to think in some new ways, too.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think the structure, one of the beauties of this … I do think the challenge for a lot of people is they’re busy, doing all kinds of stuff, and then they sit down at a blank piece of paper, a blank screen, and they’re like, “I need some ideas.” This is almost like the little candy box, right? Just go grab one out of there, and start?

Melanie Deziel: Exactly. That’s the idea. If you can select from this list of focuses, here’s the eight or 10, or more that feel good to me, here’s the five, or eight, or 14 formats, that are within my resources, you could come up with 100 plus combinations. You’re obviously not going to create 100 pieces of content, maybe about the same thing, that would probably be excessive. But, like you said, it gives your brain somewhere to focus, that you’re not starting with a blank slate. You have some prompts, if you will, to think of ideas, and then you can select from those. Okay, these three are probably the most realistic for my budget, for my timeline, for my skillset.

John Jantsch: I can see a role, even … When I say content, so many people hear blog posts, and that’s where they stop. This could be your social media calendar of things, and obviously we’re going to get into some of the formats. In fact, maybe list your 10 formats, just quickly? Then, we can come back and talk about some of my questions on those.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, definitely. The formats, this could be an almost unlimited list, because new formats are coming out all the time, new platforms are launching. So, I tried to come up with a decent combination, here, and pick 10 that I thought would be most applicable.

Melanie Deziel: Writing is first. Like I said, that’s the default for all of us. Infographics is another one, a visual way to represent our information. Audio is really having its moment, as we were talking about. Video is another big one, that obviously always creates such deep engagement. Then, I added live video as a separate one, so not bunching them together but actually thinking differently about how you might create live video.

Melanie Deziel: Number six is an image gallery, so that could be a collage, it could be a slideshow, any way you’re assembling images together. Seven is a timeline, so presenting things chronologically. Eight is a quiz, which I think is super underrated, it’s a really fun way to test knowledge, and present new information to your audience. Nine is a tool, so this would be anytime you’re helping your audience achieve something, make a calculation, convert something. You’re letting them input information, and then having a custom output of some kind. Then, 10 is a map, which again, I think maps is one of the things that we don’t use as often as we should because it feels really intimidating to create a map, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot of really easy tools out there, that can help you do that.

John Jantsch: You know, today content is everything, so our websites are really content management systems, but they’ve got to work like one. Check out Zephyr, it is a modern, cloud-based CMS system, that’s licensed only to agencies. It’s really easy to use, it’s very fast, it won’t mess with your SEO. I mean, it really reduces the time and effort to launch your clients’ websites. Beautiful themes, just really fast, profitable way to go. They include in agency services, to really make them your plug and play dev shop. Check out Zephyr.com. That is Z-E-P-H-Y-RCMS.com.

John Jantsch: Maybe expand on that map one, because I’m thinking, oh, I need to get to Des Moines tomorrow, I’ve got to pull out a map. But, that’s not necessarily what you’re talking about, is it?

Melanie Deziel: It doesn’t have to be, no. I think anytime you think of a story, you’re trying to convey … You’re doing an interview with someone and they’re mentioning different locations from their history, you’re talking about a particular story that has multiple geographic points, you can create a map, an optional, additional, or the only way to explore through that content.

Melanie Deziel: One of the things that I always remind people is that location doesn’t have to be, as you said, going to Des Moines, it’s states, and Interstates, and highways and things. You could have a map of a home, a blueprint is essentially a map of a home. If you’re doing some sort of real estate or renovation type content, you might want to have a map of home, to show where things happen. A map of the body is another option, right? If you’re doing any healthcare content, you’re talking about yoga positions, or pressure points, then a map of your body showing where different things happen may also be a really useful way to bring that to life.

Melanie Deziel: Just thinking about, if there’s any sort of placement or geographic element to what your talk about, then a map may be an option.

John Jantsch: Right. Not everybody who listens to my show has a content team. One of the things that I hear all the time, and I’m sure you’re hearing as you go out and talk to people is, “Okay, what’s the best format? If I can only do one, what’s the best format?” I’m going to let you answer that, but I’m going to throw the follow-up, too, is that is there a way to approach content creation, in format, that maybe is more efficient? Then, allows you to maybe do lots of formats?

Melanie Deziel: It sounds like the real challenge that a lot of us have, especially if you’re a content team of one, or if content is just one of many things you’ve been tasked with, is there’s only so much time and money for us to do these things. So, how do we make the most of our time and money?

Melanie Deziel: My recommendation, if you have the means, is to start with video. The reason for that is video can be repurposed more easily than any other format. Video has visual elements, so you can use short video clips, you can use stills from that video. It has the audio, so you could create audio clips from that as well. Then, that audio can be transcribed, to be come blog posts, articles, snippets for social media.

Melanie Deziel: If you’re starting with any of the others, writing, or infographic, or just audio, that’s still wonderful. If you can create one thing very well, consistently, by all means, do that. But if you are trying to create the illusion of more resources than you have, video is a really good starting point, that you could break down into many smaller elements, without too much extra work.

John Jantsch: Well, I think one of the challenges we face today is that there’s a whole lot of behavior in consumption, that we have to be addressing. I mean, some people listen to books. When I write I book, my audio book doesn’t come out the day the other book comes out, I hear from people. It’s like, “All I do is listen to audio!” Then, there are readers, then there are more visual learners.

John Jantsch: To some degree, we kind of have to cater to all of them, or at least to as wide as swath as possible, don’t we?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah. I talk about, everyone has their first content language, the one that your most comfortable creating in. For me, I’m a writer, that’s my background. I would rather sit down and write 100 blog posts, then have to edit two videos, it’s just the way my mind works. I’ll probably do it more quickly. Some people are different, and writing might give them anxiety, and they’d love to just hop on live video, and talk freely.

Melanie Deziel: Figure out what works for you. What are you most comfortable creating? Then, make sure you go that extra step, like you said, and see, what does your audience like consuming? Because there could be a gap, there, and even if you make the most amazing podcasts in the world, if your audience doesn’t listen to podcasts, you’re wasting your time. You want to make sure there’s some alignment, there. If there isn’t alignment, find someone, or a tool, that can help you bridge that gap.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’m glad you threw in that idea, of something you’re good at, or you enjoy, or it’s your preference, because this stuff’s hard work, and if it’s something you really just hate doing, you’re just not going to stick with it, so great point.

John Jantsch: So, you mentioned in your book, and I loved it, “focus before format,” which I’ve been saying strategy before tactics for years. It’s kind of the same thing. I guess, you can just clear this up, then. You’re saying somebody should say, “Okay, I’m going to write about this. This is my focus, now let’s figure out all the formats it could go in.”

Melanie Deziel: Exactly. Ask, what’s the story you’re trying to tell? Then ask, what’s the best way to bring that specific story to life?

Melanie Deziel: So, a lot of times we do the opposite, just like you said, we go for tactics. We’re like, “I need a viral tweet.” But, about what? Then, you end up with a lackluster “about what.” So, we want to start with, what is this story about? Then okay, does it have visual elements? If so, maybe it would make a good video. If not, we’re probably going to have a very boring video, if there’s no visual elements to this whole story. By starting with your focus, and then asking which format is best to bring this to life, you ensure that you’re going to have some good alignment there, between the two.

John Jantsch: How closely should your focus be aligned with, say, business goals?

Melanie Deziel: I think, at the end of the day, all the content we make has to, in some way, help our business goals. So again, that’s one thing I always try to underscore. I’m not advocating that you make every possible piece of content you could with this system, or that you create every single interaction, or combination of the focuses and formats.

Melanie Deziel: But, if you know that your overarching goal is I want to create deeper relationships with this type of audience member, or I want create awareness around this event that we’re throwing, or I want to help people better understand a particular topic, then that helps you choose from amongst the focuses and the formats.

Melanie Deziel: So, for example, if your goal is, “Look, our customers really misunderstand this particular area of what we do, we need to do some education.” You’d look at that list and say, “Well, telling them about our Founder, doing a people focused story, that’s not really going to clear up that matter, so we’ll skip that for now.” But maybe a history, helping them understand the history of that particular issue, challenge, area, that might be helpful. Process would almost certainly be helpful, help them understand the thing that they maybe misunderstand, how it comes to life, what’s right and wrong there.

Melanie Deziel: Then saying, “Okay, if we’re trying to show a process, is the best way to do that process through writing? Maybe it is, but maybe we need to show that process, so we should try an image gallery, showing each step, or a video, or a live video, so that they can watch it happen.”

Melanie Deziel: As long as you start with your why, and then your big business goals, then asking, what sort of focuses make sense for that? Then, what sort of formats make sense, with that?

John Jantsch: Yeah, to your story of the viral video, so many people created ones, that got millions of views, that actually didn’t cause any business objectives to be met. It’s kind of like, well, is that worth the time?

John Jantsch: You have … and I’m imagining you, in workshops, almost playing Tic-Tac-Toe, with the boxes of this, and filling it in. You have some visuals, of the framework. Can we post those, in the show?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, we’ll see what we can throw up there. Actually, I have a little cheat sheet, that includes the focuses and the frameworks. Maybe what we can do is we can include the link, and then a code to download that, for your listeners? That should be easy. Yeah, we’ll definitely do that.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, it’s absolutely a fun little game. A lot of times, what I do in workshops is we’ll actually use a 10-sided die. Have you ever seen 10-sided dice? We’ll roll them, to come up with random combinations, and just see what we can come up with.

John Jantsch: That’s actually really cool, because that’s probably as accurate as somebody just picking.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just a good thought exercise. Like I said, sometimes, you get a combination that, “Okay, this doesn’t align with our goals.” Or, “We could do this, but it probably wouldn’t be great.” Again, at least you’re not a blank slate, and that will sometimes spur an idea for something related, that is actually a much better strategic fit.

John Jantsch: I have never seen a 10-sided die, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around what that would even look like.

Melanie Deziel: It’s quite an odd shape.

John Jantsch: It must be. It can barely sit on its side.

John Jantsch: So Melanie, where can people find out more about The Content Fuel Framework, and of course, the work that you’re doing?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, you can learn more about my team and my company at Storyfuel.co. So, Story F-U-E-L.C-O.

Melanie Deziel: The book, if you want to buy it, is at IWantMelaniesBook.com, nice and easy. But, you can learn more at ContentFuelFramework.com, as well. There’s even instructions there, if you want to make that 10-sided die game, if you want to see what the 10-sided die look like, and make that game, there’s instruction cards there. You can try it out yourself.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well Melanie, thanks for dropping by. Are you in New Jersey, New York?

Melanie Deziel: I am.

John Jantsch: New Jersey?

Melanie Deziel: I’m right in Jersey City, so I pretend to be both.

John Jantsch: Okay. Well, I was picking up just … I have a client that lives in Northern New Jersey, and you sound exactly like her, so I was pretty sure that’s where.

Melanie Deziel: That makes me happy. I’ve not lived in Jersey my whole life, so that means I’m starting to sink in.

John Jantsch: Oh, happy. Yeah, it’s starting to get to some of your phrases.

Melanie Deziel: There we go.

John Jantsch: All right Melanie, thanks for dropping by. Hopefully, we’ll run into you soon, out there on the road.

Melanie Deziel: Definitely. Thanks for letting me share my story.

The Role of Sales Materials in a Digital World

The Role of Sales Materials in a Digital World written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The digital world has complicated the customer journey. Where customers used to have to reach out to salespeople if they wanted to learn more about a business, they can now do the bulk of their research into a company online. They can pour through the pages of your website, read reviews from existing customers to glean the unvarnished truth about your business, and peek at your social media presence to get a better sense of your personality.

With these digital marketing channels doing so much of the heavy lifting in representing your brand, do you really still need sales materials? Will a prospect really leaf through your catalog or read your brochure?

The answer to these questions is a resounding yes! Sales materials still hold an important place in the customer journey. Whether your sales team is meeting with prospects in person or via video call, there is still a place for presentation materials and leave-behinds.

Why Sales Materials Still Matter

Some businesses have convinced themselves that digital marketing is all that matters in 2020. But printed materials remain an important piece of the puzzle. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service did some research into the effectiveness of print over digital marketing channels (of course, they have a vested interest in proving that print still holds value!), and what they found was fascinating.

People who read printed materials spent a longer time engaging with the material, had a greater emotional reaction to the content, and were more likely to place higher value on the product or service outlined than those engaging with digital materials.

Sales materials can help you do all of the following:

Build trust. When you spend the money to get nice printed materials made, it makes a strong impression. You signal to prospects that you’re not some rinky-dink operation. You’re a professional business who cares enough about what you do to spend the time and money on creating high-quality, lasting materials.
Leave a footprint. We’re all bombarded by digital messaging each day. From hundreds of emails to banner ads across every site, it’s easy to tune out that digital noise. If you can leave something physical behind, like a brochure or postcard, you’re far less easily forgotten.
Show, don’t tell. We all know that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. There’s certainly some truth to that, and leaving behind print materials that are filled with eye-popping visuals can help you show off your business in a whole new way.
Add value. Hopefully you’ve already got a website that’s filled with great content and smart content upgrades. Sales materials can take things one step further. By sharing new information with prospects who meet with your team one-on-one, you give a sense of added value and they come to like and trust you even more.

How to Make Sales Materials Count Today

While sales materials do still have a place in today’s world, it’s undeniable that digital marketing has changed the landscape and influenced what works and what doesn’t when it comes to creating great sales materials. Here are some tips to help you create materials that catch eyes and make a lasting impression.

Invest in High-Quality Materials

This might sound like a no-brainer, but sales materials—whether printed or digital—will only work in your favor if they look great. Fliers on printer paper, hastily run through a black-and-white copy machine, will not inspire a whole lot of trust. Same goes for a poorly formatted PowerPoint. It makes you look sloppy and leaves prospects guessing about how much time and effort you put into caring for your customers.

Your sales materials must continue to speak for you long after the actual meeting with your prospect is over. So make sure they look nice! It’s worth investing in the creative—smart copy, bright visuals, great design and layout. If we’re talking print materials, it’s also worth your while to send it out to a professional print shop, rather than trying to do it on your office printer. Companies like Vistaprint and Moo allow any business access to fast, affordable, high-quality print options.

Personalize Everything

Personalization is a must in today’s sales and marketing world. Google reports that 61 percent of people expect experiences and interactions with a brand be tailored to their preferences. Your sales materials should be no exception to the personalization rule.

With the proliferation of low-cost, high-quality print services, it’s entirely possible for you to create several variations of the same brochure, catalog, or product sheets that are tailored to the needs of different segments of your audience.

Let’s say you’re a marketing consultant who focuses on small businesses (sound familiar?). Perhaps there are certain niches you focus on: home service providers, early education and childcare providers, and local car dealerships. Even if you offer the same marketing packages to each segment, you can create a brochure that highlights case studies from the specific industry and speaks to how your marketing method is applied specifically in your prospect’s field.

You can get great results in sales with low-tech personalization, too. Consider asking your salesperson to write a hand-written note (on a branded postcard, of course!) to slip into the brochure or catalog they’re leaving behind with their prospect. That attention to detail can make a strong, positive impression.

Continue to Add Value

When we talk about great sales materials, we’re talking about materials that continue to add value. Sure, your branded magnets, tote bags, and pens might be fun little add-ons. But how often does the tote end up at the bottom of someone’s desk drawer and the magnet find itself relegated to the side of the office fridge?

Branded tchotchkes don’t further your conversations with prospects, whereas great sales materials do. Make your leave-behind something that adds value. It shouldn’t be the white paper or Ebook that’s available for download on your website. Instead, make your sales materials information that prospects can’t get by simply going online.

Additionally, the content of the sales materials should fit in with your broader sales conversations and marketing strategy. The content shouldn’t come out of left field. Instead, it should help guide the in-person discussion between your sales rep and prospect, and then serve as a reminder of all their discussion points for the prospect who looks back at them later.

Encourage Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing

The best way to ensure you’re creating meaningful sales materials is to get your marketing team involved in the conversation. The customer journey today is far more convoluted than ever before, and it means there’s an unprecedented level of overlap between what your sales and marketing teams do.

Don’t leave your sales team to write and design their own brochures. But on the flip side, don’t let your marketing team create the content blind. Your sales team has the boots-on-the-ground experience and can share real-world insight into what works and what doesn’t in terms of messaging.

They can also let the marketing team know about gaps in their sales presentation and how printed or digital materials can help fill them. The marketing team, in turn, can finesse the messaging of the sales team, bring consistency to presentations and materials, and elevate sales materials to the appropriate level.

Sales materials, whether or printed or digital, still have an important role to play in today’s customer journey. While you might feel tempted to let your digital marketing and sales reps do all the talking for you, there’s still value in providing a meaningful, thoughtful leave-behind to complement sales discussions.

Creating a Podcast as Part of Your Prospecting Process

Creating a Podcast as Part of Your Prospecting Process written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Steve Gordon
Podcast Transcript

Steve Gordon headshot Today on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Steve Gordon. He’s the founder of The Unstoppable CEO, where he helps agencies and consultants to build relationships with prospects and close deals without having to sell.

One of his favorite secret weapons in the prospecting process is podcasting. The medium has become increasingly popular over the years, with countless entrepreneurs and executives tuning into podcasts as a source of guidance and information as they run their businesses.

When you create a podcast that becomes a valuable source of information, you position your business as the go-to when listeners need services or products in your space. Plus, by inviting your ideal prospects on as guests, you build one-on-one relationships and demonstrate your value without resorting to typical, icky-feeling sales tactics.

On this episode, Gordon and I speak about the many virtues of podcasting, and he shares tips for business owners who are ready to start a podcast of their own!

Questions I ask Steve Gordon:

Does everybody need a podcast in business?
What are the positive marketing elements inherent in podcasting?
How hard is it to set up a podcast?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How podcasting can open new doors for you in terms of relationship building.
How to find prospects to invite onto your podcast.
How to use other people’s podcasts to find guests for your own show.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Steve Gordon:

Learn more about Steve Gordon and Unstoppable CEO
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Transcript of Creating a Podcast as Part of Your Prospecting Process

Transcript of Creating a Podcast as Part of Your Prospecting Process written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hey, marketing today has gotten harder. There’s so many new platforms. How do you reach the right audience? Fortunately, there’s a simple way. LinkedIn can help you speak with the right professionals at the right time.

John Jantsch: Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Steve Gordon. He is an author and founder, CEO of Unstoppable CEO. He’s also got a podcast by the same name, and we are going to talk about that today, podcasting and more specifically podcast prospecting. Using your podcast not just as a way to create content, but as a way to actually create clients. So Steve, thanks for joining me.

Steve Gordon: Hey John, great to be here.

John Jantsch: So I, my first question was Unstoppable CEO. You want to unpack the meaning behind that name of your company. I know that doesn’t have anything to do with podcasting, but I’m just curious.

Steve Gordon: Well, it doesn’t, and of course when we started we weren’t doing much of anything with podcasting when we started about 10 years ago. But that came out of a conversation that I was having with a buddy and when I started the business, he was asking like, “Who are you really trying to be a hero to here?” And I started describing him, it’s the business owner that sort of started with the dream and then they scratched and clawed and built it to the point where they really could have a business that sustained their life and then, wham, the world hit them with a curve ball and then they crawled back to the top of the mountain past that and they got hit again and they just kept going and going and going. And he said, “Oh, they’re unstoppable, you mean.” I said, “Wow, that’s it. That’s who we’re going after.” So we named the company that because that’s kind of our way to stay focused on who we’re really serving.

John Jantsch: No, that’s awesome. Certainly, resilience is a key ingredient to doing this as an entrepreneur because you will get knocked down. So it’s just the ones that get up and learn from it are the ones that succeed ultimately. So does everybody need a podcast? I’m going to sort of be facetious a little bit and kind of throw out what I hear and I’m sure you hear all the time, “Oh there’s so many of them out there already. It’s over-saturated. It’s yesterday’s thing.” So I’m playing devil’s advocate for you.

Steve Gordon: Well I heard Seth Godin say that everybody needs a podcast, so I’m going to believe Seth. Yeah, I think everybody needs a podcast in business. And it used to be that we’d say everybody needs a blog. You need a way to kind of communicate with your prospects, your clients, your partners and all that. The problem that I found, John, over the years and, and maybe you’ve run into this too, is that most business owners, A, are really, really busy and B, they weren’t born natural writers. And they seem to be kind of allergic to having to sit down with a blank screen and write something. And one of the things that I think is magic about podcast, one of the many things that I think is magic about it, is all you got to be able to do is have a conversation. And I have yet to meet a business owner that couldn’t do that.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah. Or, as you said, you ask them to write 200 words describing their business and it’d be the scariest project you’d give them, but then they would talk for two hours about their business.

Steve Gordon: Absolutely. And easily so. Happily so.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve actually used that as a technique to get content produced for a lot of business owners, particularly in an industry I didn’t know anything about. I wasn’t going to be able to write any content, but I would just interview people, capture the interviews really before we even thought about using the audio content. But I would actually then transcribe that and turn it into a blog post or into an about us page or something. It’s so much easier.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. Well we’ve really started thinking about about podcasts as kind of the foundational layer for the marketing at a business because of what you just described, you can do so many different things with the content and you can repurpose it in so many ways. So if we start with that as the foundation, it gives you this really great capability to do two fundamental things that I think are important. One is it’s a great platform for building relationships and two is the byproduct, you get this like great content out of that that’s a byproduct that you can just send out to everybody that you ultimately want to do business with and nurture them and keep them interested in you and keep you top of mind.

John Jantsch: Yeah. When people had the same sort of pushback with blogs, I don’t know, 10 years ago I was telling people, stop calling them blogs. It’s just content. It’s just content that your customers, your prospects need, search engines need, all these things. And I’ve gotten to calling podcasting just audio content because I really think that’s maybe a fuller way to look at it.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, think so. One of the things that I really didn’t fully understand when I first got into it was that you’ve got this platform that you’ve created and people will listen to it. Even if a lot of people aren’t listening to it. Let’s say you’re a small business, a local business, and all you’re doing is recording these conversations and you’re sending them out to whoever is in your local community that you want to stay in touch with. Even at that, it is so easy to invite someone on and get them to happily say yes and then begin to build a relationship with them. I started actually my first podcast, I took inspiration from you back way back in 2012. I was listening to John Jantsch on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and thought, “I need one of those.”

Steve Gordon: And we started one and I went and interviewed 50 marketing and business experts all over the world. People I would never would’ve been able to meet otherwise. But because I had a podcast, they were open to sitting down and having a conversation with me. And that worked really well. We got new business out of it. Big mistake I made is I didn’t have a team behind me. So after 52 episodes I got busy and couldn’t keep up with it.

Steve Gordon: But those relationships are probably some of the most valuable relationships that I have still to this day in business. In fact, when I wrote my first book in 2014 I went back to that group of people, 15 of them. So small percentage, 15 of the 50 said, “Yeah, I’ll help you promote the book.” And that took that book from nothing … I mean, we had a tiny little email list of a thousand people and within short order, that book was in the hands of 5,000 people that I never knew.

John Jantsch: Yeah. People who’ve listened to this show for any length of time, know that I call it my dirty little secret. I started podcasting, not because I wanted to build some podcasting empire, it just gave me an excuse to have conversations with people I wanted to have conversations with. And what I found was that we talked off air about … or maybe that was on the recording already about my friend Seth Godin, who has been just a great ally and promoter of all things Duct Tape. And he was one of my first interviews. And I guarantee you if I sent Seth an email even 10, 15 years ago and said, “Hey, can we get on the phone for about 20 minutes so I can pick your brain?” It’d be like delete, even as even as nice as he is.

John Jantsch: But when you send an email to that same person and say, “Hey, I see you have a new book coming out, I’d actually like to interview you and promote that book.” Well, all of a sudden you get a lot more attention. You’re a member of the media. Even now that podcasts are so mainstream, people still react that way, so I would keep doing this just because I get to have great conversations with people like you.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I tell you, it’s my favorite thing to do in my day when I go to work. If I see that I’ve got podcast interviews it’s great because I know number one, I’m going to have fun doing it. Two, I’m going to make some really great relationships and when we’re coaching a business through this process of strategically how to use their podcast, we usually will tell them, “Look, you want to have two kinds of audiences that you’re thinking about here. You want to think about, from a a referral standpoint, who are the relationships that you want to nurture or start where they’ve got influence over your potential clients? And go out and invite those people and interview them.

John Jantsch: And then I think a strategy that’s under utilized is to look at who are the clients you really want to do business with, maybe those strategic clients that would be really hard to reach any other way. They’ve got all of the gatekeepers up and all that. Well, if you’re kind of approaching it as … we call it being a success journalist for the industry. So you go to an industry leader and say, “I’m interviewing all of the industry leaders about how they’ve become so successful. Would you like to share your success story?” You’ve just parachuted over all the gatekeepers.

John Jantsch: That’s right.

Steve Gordon: And now you’re going to build a relationship with that person without being a salesperson, you know?

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I’ve gotten pushback over the years with people kind of saying that, “Oh yeah, well you’re an author and you interview these people that are authors and whatnot, but my little business that doesn’t make sense.” And you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, if you want to work with mid market size company CEOs in your town, start interviewing them because, hey, it’s great content. I mean if that’s the market you’re in, you may actually have a conversation with somebody who says, “Well gosh Steve, tell me about what you do.” But even if you don’t, their peers are going to see that content, they’re going to want to promote that content for you. So it just has so many really positive marketing elements, doesn’t it?

Steve Gordon: Oh, it does completely. And it’s really fairly easy we found to take the interview that you have and at the end of that, you usually have some time scheduled once the recording stops and extend the conversation a little bit. And so, John, you’re familiar with Strategic Coach, right? Dan Sullivan?

John Jantsch: Oh sure. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:10:16].

Steve Gordon: So you’re probably familiar with the Dan Sullivan Question, right?

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Steve Gordon: So it’s a great little book. If you’ve never read it, go get the Dan Sullivan Question. And at the end of a podcast interview-

John Jantsch: Takes about 10 minutes.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s a 10 minute read. The question sounds something like this, “Hey John, if we were having this conversation three years from today, what would have to happen for you to feel happy with your progress?” And then you just be quiet and you listen to them and they’re going to tell you what their goals are in the future.

Steve Gordon: And if you’re talking with a referral partner or with a potential client, they’re basically giving you the roadmap for how you can come and add value to them. And so you need that raw material and then usually what we’ll say is something like, “That’s really great. You know, I interview lots of people on this podcast. I bet that if I think about it a little bit, I’ll have some connections that can help you get to this goal that you just told me about. Would you like to get together on Tuesday for 20 minutes and I’ll have some connections for you?” And they always say yes.

Steve Gordon: So now you’ve got a second meeting and you come back with those connections and with some ideas and if it’s a prospect and you’ve really thoughtfully targeted who that prospect is, chances are I’ll bet one of those ideas might be working with your company. And it’s a real easy thing to say. It’s just, “Hey John, I’ve been thinking about all those things. You told me that goal you had and I think we might be able to help get you there. Would you be interested in talking about that?”

John Jantsch: Yeah. I want to go back to one of the things you said is that in that conversation they will tell you ways that you might be able to add value. You did not say ways that you might be able to sell to them. And I think that’s a really key distinction, because a lot of people just go in, sell, sell, sell, and they don’t listen to “How can I add value?” Because you’re right. That in the end is all people care about, is receiving that. So I think that’s an important distinction.

Steve Gordon: Oh, it’s really critical. I mean, selling is all about friction, I think. And adding value, they pull you along. There’s no friction.

John Jantsch: Do you know there are over 62 million decision makers on LinkedIn? Yeah. And even small and medium sized businesses are making the most out of LinkedIn ads. They’re using LinkedIn to get their voices heard and their messages to resonate with the audience. And it’s not just about awareness either. LinkedIn ads are driving traffic and engagement. If you want to check it out, try for yourself. LinkedIn is offering a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit to launch your first campaign. Simply visit linkedin.com/ducttape. D-U-C-T-T-A-P-E. That’s linkedin.com/ducttape. So there’s some terms and conditions that may apply, but I urge you to go check it out for yourself.

John Jantsch: So, not intentionally, but you jumped ahead to one of the questions I wanted to ask. So let’s back up a minute and maybe let’s just break down the steps. We’ve kind of made it sound really simple, but let’s break down the steps for people. So we talked about why they would need a podcast. How have you found in today’s world is the best way to find prospects. So let’s say they know who their ideal client is. They have decided they’re going to do a show focused on that ideal client. How do they find those prospects?

Steve Gordon: Well, chances are they probably already know who they are. Most business owners have an idea. So you start with the list you have. And then when we’re working with a business to kind of go through this process, we help them really get clear on who their ideal client is and kind of create a profile there that’s not anything revolutionary. That’s kind of marketing 101, but then from there we take that and we’ll help them build out that list based on that profile. And we call it the target 100 process. And so we want to have a list of around a hundred people that’s always a working list that we’re inviting to to come and be a guest on their podcast.

John Jantsch: All right, so what if I don’t know all those people. I mean maybe I’ve got a couple of clients, I’ve got a little bit of a network. I’ve been in an a BNI group or something like that, but I want to go bigger. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Are you a fan?

Steve Gordon: Yeah, it works great. We use that. We use the web. One of the secrets, if you want to go bigger and level up is to go look at other people’s podcasts and see who’s been interviewed. And those people you know are going to be interested. They usually have an audience, so if you’d want to sort of level up … We’ve got one client who’s doing this right now. He’s had a local virtual CFO business and wants to take it national and so he was actually an officer in his BNI group. Well that will only get him in his town. It won’t get him beyond his town. So he’s now going through and we’re getting guests booked who have audiences and looking at who’s been on other podcasts to do that. And it’s just so easy.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ll tell you another benefit that once you’re doing this for a while and interviewing a lot of people for awhile, at least in my case, I had a book come out recently, and I just went and looked at everybody I’ve interviewed the last three years. And I sent them all an email saying, “Hey, will you help with the book?” Well, lo and behold, 75% of them have a podcast now. So it kind of filled up my podcast schedule just from people that I had booked. And I think that that’s probably something people can expect as sort of that reverse kind of strategic partnership arrangement almost.

Steve Gordon: Oh, it absolutely works. You mentioned something earlier, in the beginning you said, kind of being a little devil’s advocate that, “Aren’t there too many podcasts? Isn’t it’s saturated at this stage?” One of the really interesting things that we’ve discovered is that there are an awful lot of podcasts listeners, particularly business owners, and so many of them are curious about how this whole process works. And when you ask them for an interview and they don’t have a podcast, but they’re a podcast listener, they are suddenly fascinated by it. And they’ll jump at the chance and then they want to ask you everything about how it works. So you really become a leader to them in a really interesting way.

John Jantsch: I record this show in my little office in Kansas city and I have a full glass front on my office and people walk by and they they’re absolutely convinced I must be a radio DJ or something. So they sit there and stare. All right, so I’ve got my list of prospects, I know what my show’s going to be about. I’m really pumped to go out and start spreading the world. How hard is it to set up a podcast?

Steve Gordon: That’s where everybody tends to fall down. Now it’s getting easier. So there are services where you can kind of go and get it set up and they take care of a lot of the basic technical details. But our recommendation is that you build a team to do it because your job as the business owners just to show up and talk. You want to be able to engage with the person that you’re trying to build a relationship with. That’s the fundamental reason you’re doing it. And you’ve got other things to do. Most business owners I know don’t have any extra time. And so you becoming an audio engineer and a copywriter and the marketing tech person and all of that is I think kind of foolish. So get a team, whether you get an internal team to do it, whether you get a bunch of freelancers that you want to manage to do it, whether you get a team like ours or one of the many others that is now in this space. But do yourself a favor and get, get support.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And when you say team, a team can mean somebody that gives you three hours a week. It doesn’t have to be, “I need to hire these five different individuals.” I mean my podcast is just that, I do generally invite my guests, I do the interviews and once I hit stop, I don’t touch it anymore. But the person that takes it over is in New York city and does all the work virtually and in about, I want to say, two hours an episode. So I mean it’s relatively inexpensive and as you said, your time is probably better spent going in, cutting another deal for your business, as opposed to doing this.

John Jantsch: But the benefits long term are worth the investment of that time. All right. You touched on this, but I want to hit it just a little bit again because I think when I talk about this idea of it being a great prospecting tool, there is a danger in somebody getting somebody on the phone and then just immediately selling to them. And so I’d love it if you’d kind of go over again, so we’ve done the interview, it’s been a great conversation. How do I sort of elegantly make that transition to talking a little bit about what I do or asking them about what they need, because I think I could see people fumbling that.

Steve Gordon: Well, yeah. I think that’s probably the one spot where you could make the biggest mistake with it. I have this principle. I learned it from a good friend of mine who’s very, very successful in the life insurance industry, probably one of the top guys in the country. And he talks about this idea of purity of intent. And so anytime I’m approaching anything that’s related to marketing or sales, I’m kind of getting myself in this place of purity of intent. And for me what that means is being 100% focused on the person that I’m with and how do I add value to them? That’s critical.

Steve Gordon: So you have this interview, you’re already adding value to them because you’ve invited this business owner on to promote themselves. Okay. And you’ve ended the recording and now it’s really easy to say, “Wow, John, that was amazing. I learned so much. I had no idea you were into all those things. I’m really curious, where do you see yourself in three years? What has to happen between now and three years from today for you to feel really happy with your progress?” Which is the the Dan Sullivan question we talked about earlier. And they’ll tell you where they’re going and then you just need to listen and say, “Wow, I could help. I could help him get there quicker or I could help him get there easier.”

Steve Gordon: And it might be making connections. It might be you can help them from a business perspective. But I always like to give space. So I said before, I said the thing we always teach our clients to do is just say, “Hey look, would it be okay if we got together on Tuesday, or pick whatever day, for 15 or 20 minutes. I’d like to think about it a little bit.” And that way you get some space so that it doesn’t feel like you’re suddenly turning the tables. And if you’re coming from this place of purity of intent, it works.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So you have written a book on Podcast Prospecting that you want to tell us about it and how people can perhaps get that. And of course, as always, we’ll have any links in the show notes.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. So, John, we’ve put up a page just for Duct Tape Marketing listeners where they can get … this is my newest book. It’s my fourth book and the title is Podcast Prospecting. So if they go to unstoppableceo.net/dtm, there they’ll be able to get a free copy of the book. And if anybody wants to talk with me about podcasting, I’d love to brainstorm a little bit how they might be able to do that in their business.

John Jantsch: Awesome. And as I said, we’ll have that in the show notes and I know a lot of people that would love to get that, and I appreciate the gracious offer to our listeners. So Steve, thanks for stopping by and spending a little time talking about Podcast Prospecting and hopefully we’ll see you soon someday out there on the road.

Steve Gordon: Thanks, John.

Weekend Favs February 15

Weekend Favs February 15 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

Mailflow – Manage your to-dos, projects, and notes all from within your Gmail.
BuzzSumo YouTube Influencers– Find video influencers in your field.
BuzzSumo YouTube Content – Discover the most popular videos on YouTube in your area of interest.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

Spotting Inflection Points in Your Industry

Spotting Inflection Points in Your Industry written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Rita McGrath
Podcast Transcript

Rita McGrath headshot Today on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I sit down with globally-recognized expert on strategy, innovation and growth Rita McGrath.

McGrath is a professor at Columbia Business School and directs the popular Leading Strategic Growth and Change program. Additionally, she works with leadership at global brands, helping them to strategically navigate through disruption and inflection points.

She is the author of a number of best-selling business books, including Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Today on the podcast, she talks about inflection points that may be lurking in the shadows around your business, shares some examples of other businesses who have thrived despite disruption, and provides actionable steps to help you do the same.

Questions I ask Rita McGrath:

What is an inflection point?
How do you spot an inflection point?
Do smaller businesses have an advantage when it comes to weathering disruption?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to use little bets to get insights into what might be changing in your world.
What industries McGrath sees as being due for disruption.
What inflection point cuts across all industries, that every business should be aware of.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Rita McGrath:

Learn more about Rita McGrath
Order your copy of Seeing Around Corners
Follow on Facebook
Follow on Twitter
Connect on LinkedIn
Follow on Instagram

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re looking to grow your business there is only one way: by building real, quality customer relationships. That’s where Klaviyo comes in.

Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

What’s their secret? Tune into Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday docu-series to find out and unlock marketing strategies you can use to keep momentum going year-round. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf.

Transcript of Spotting Inflection Points in Your Industry

Transcript of Spotting Inflection Points in Your Industry written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

Klaviyo logo

John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rita McGrath. She is a globally recognized expert on strategy, innovation and growth, and also the author of a fairly new book called Seeing Around Corners: How to spot inflection points in business before they happen. Rita, thanks for joining me.

Rita McGrath: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch: I’m guessing I won’t be the first person to ask this, you’re far more educated than some of my other guests. But, what is an inflection point? Let’s start there.

Rita McGrath: An inflection point is some change in the environment that creates a 10 times impact on your business, whether for good or for ill. As an example, the advent of digitization has created inflection points for sectors as wide varying as television, media, advertising. And content distribution.

John Jantsch: I know that obviously the first part of the book is, how do you see one of these coming? How do you decide what to do about it? I think the fact that’s exactly the way the book’s broken up, and how to bring your organization with you. But let’s start with, I mean, I don’t think these things come knocking on the door, right? How do you, sort of see them sneaking up on you?

Rita McGrath: Well, I think the first thing to remember is that they don’t happen instantly. They feel instant when you are experiencing their effects, but if you think about just the digital revolution as a case in point, we’ve had this thing building up since the early 90s, when we had the first friendly web browser, and the seeds of it go back even further back than that. The inspiration is really a bit like the line in Ernest Hemingway’s book, The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another, “Well, how did you go bankrupt?” And the response was, “Well, gradually and then suddenly.” I think the first thing to remember is you can spot the early warnings long before these things are at your doorstep demanding that you respond to them.

John Jantsch: What do you say to that company that, and my whole business, really the last 30 years that I’ve been in my business, I’ve seen all of this digital transformation for sure, but what do you say to that company that says, I see this coming, but to actually respond the way that we think we need to is suicide. I’ll give you a great example. I used to, because I’ve had a marketing business, I used to run a lot of ads in newsprint. In fact, we used to run a lot of classified ads for certain things. That was a huge revenue. In fact, I think the classified ad business was half of the ads that newspapers got, and that went away one day completely. They certainly could have seen it coming. They saw what Craigslist was doing, for example, but to do something about it meant that they were going to gut their business.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I think a stellar example for that business specifically, is the Norway based companies Schibsted, and their head of operations said in the early 90s, he said the internet is perfect for classified ads, classified ads are perfect for the internet. What they did, which a lot of newspapers didn’t, is they incented their leaders, whether you were part of the digital division, or whether you were part of the print division, what mattered to your bonus and compensation was whether you kept that client for Schibsted, however they wanted to do business with you. What you find most of the newspapers did in the early days of digital was they just messed that completely up, because they put the digital division and the print divisions basically at war with each other. And so you ended up with the digital division not getting the resources that it needed to make a smooth transition. Today Schibsted, is I think, one of the top three, maybe even the top two classified advertising providers on the planet.

John Jantsch: Well, I think what you also saw was a lot of people kind of sticking their head in the sand saying we’re just going to ride this out. I’m a 62 year old CEO, and I’ve got a board and to make some giant change that is going to save us in 10 years from now. That’s a hard decision isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: It is, and it takes a lot of courage. I think this is where I really want to have boards take a more forward looking view because you can’t expect that, that 62 year old CEO who’s bonus and comp and retirement is going to depend on short term performance in the next two years to do this. But the boards have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors, and as the business round table has recently pointed out to the larger communities that organizations serve, and I just think far too many boards roll over and play dead and don’t take that responsibility seriously enough.

John Jantsch: Are there certain gauges that people, and obviously I’m sure it varies by industries, but are there certain things that people should be checking in on a couple times a year, or to start spotting some of these, maybe they start out as trends before they overwhelm an industry?

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). One of the most effective things companies can do, is make sure that they’ve got some budget, some resource set aside for experimenting with what I call options, what some people call little bets. These are small investments that you make that give you some insight into what could be changing in your world. They’re not big, bet the company, huge commitments, but they’re small experiments.

Rita McGrath: Let me take an example, just because that’ll make it more clear for people. Nike for years, felt that there was an opportunity to have some kind of direct connection with their consumers. In the late 80s they invented this horrible thing called, I think it was called the Nike motion, which was like you strapped it around your waist, and it had little sensors in it, which could peer at the ground and tell you how fast you were going and all that sort of thing. It was kind of kludgy and it caught on with a niche, but it really didn’t get anywhere. But they never really dropped the idea.

Rita McGrath: The opportunity for getting close to customers revived again after Apple introduced the first iPod. We forget, we think this is ancient history, it was 2001, I mean it wasn’t that long ago. What they did was they partnered with Nike, they invented this sensor, which became part of the Nike plus system, and today Nike plus the website, 20 years later, has something like 135 million members on it. That digital inflection, they were experimenting with it all along. When it finally came to be, as is the case now, that companies are discovering the power of going direct to consumer, Nike was already perfectly positioned.

John Jantsch: Some people might assume, and I’m prepared for you to bat this right back at me, but some people might assume that smaller organizations, small companies actually have an advantage when it comes to kind of changing direction or innovating. Would you say that that’s true?

Rita McGrath: Well, yes, they have fewer assets to mess around with. Back to our newspaper guys, if you were running a major newspaper back in the 80s, I mean the stuff that was on your mind was not classified ads, it was union contracts< and truck driver [inaudible 00:00:07:51], the price of paper, and did you get reliable ink supply? When you go to a digital footprint, all those assets become kind of irrelevant. I think it is easier for a smaller firm if they decide to shift direction, because they don’t have all those assets that have to be written off and dealt with in otherwise navigated.

John Jantsch: A company that you use as an example in the book is Adobe –

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: – and of course a lot of software companies, we all bought the CDs, and boxes, and that kind of stuff, and we no longer do that anymore, but Adobe really went all in didn’t they?

Rita McGrath: Yes they did. They burned the bridges.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I remember buying a PageMaker in a box, which of course they bought from Aldus, which was kind of their flagship, which of course obviously now is much roomed into hundreds and hundreds of titles. But do you, in your research, is there something that other than them, maybe what appeared to be taking a big gamble, is there something that you believe made them sure that this was the inflection point?

Rita McGrath: I think it actually has its roots in the great recession. The problem with buying shrink-wrapped software, is if you run out of free cash flow, it’s very easy for you to decide to hang onto whatever you’ve got for another year. Adobe really had a big setback, and you often see this pattern where something happens that suddenly causes people to say, hang on this time is different. I think what that got them thinking, the fact that they had that shock, got them thinking very hard about the future of their business, and how could you do a couple of things. Firstly was ensure a more stable revenue stream so that you weren’t depending on people making an discretionary purchase.

Rita McGrath: But the second one was, as you looked at how technology was evolving in that kind of 2006, 2007, 2008 period, something we have again forgotten is that that was really when Cloud took off as the business model, and Salesforce led the way with this idea of monthly recurring revenue, but it was starting to be real. I think what Adobe realized, was not only were they vulnerable to buyers suddenly deciding they didn’t need to spend that kind of money, but that a new competitor could come in and use these new technologies and knock them off their perch. I think it was kind of two revelations over time that caused them to make that decision.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I think it’s one of those that was a tough decision, but it was an inevitable one, I guess. But it was, I think, tough because the technology wasn’t quite there yet and the online versions were not very good initially.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: I mean, now they’ve certainly caught up, but I think they were basically not only changing their business model, they were creating an experience for a customer that maybe wasn’t as good.

Rita McGrath: Right. One of the things I thought was smart about what they did was they said, look, the online version has to have different attributes than the version that lives by itself in your desktop, and our initial online customers are going to be people that really value that. One of the things for instance that they did that was different was, you used to have to pay a ton of money for Adobe, and so the only people that could afford it were either very much in that space or larger institutions. Well today you can be an Adobe customer for $7.99 a month. If all you want to do is have their password protection capability on your PDFs, you can do that very inexpensively. They really opened up the market to a whole lot of users who couldn’t afford to be part of their universe before.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you’re right though, the model changes so much in terms of distribution, and assets, and hard costs, that it really allows for that kind of innovation, doesn’t it?

Rita McGrath: It does. Yeah.

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John Jantsch: Are there any industries that you look at right now and think, boy, they’d better be watching out?

Rita McGrath: Oh absolutely. Any industry that’s been stable for a really long period of time, and hasn’t really had to deal with much disruption. Examples are the construction business, the guys that make roofing tiles and that kind of thing. I think insurance is very interesting how stable it’s been, even though it sells a digital product by and large, definitely retail, we’re already seeing retail going through a major revolution.

Rita McGrath: I do a monthly newsletter and this month, the situation I looked at was holiday shopping and how that’s changed, and just some really interesting trends in the way that we deal with customers. I mean, for example in marketing as you know, the traditional gold star was you thought about the marketing funnel, and so you sort of had leads coming in the top and money flowing out the bottom, and in between where these hapless customers, which we tried to celebrate from the cash in their wallets, and right now what we see is this really immersive set of customer experiences where we’re constantly in contact with customers at any possible point in their journey. It’s really a radical transformation.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I would say another thing that I see, is that we are sometimes not in contact with them at all when they are going on the journey, that they’re in control of it and when and how they engage is totally up to them, or how they do their research, and a lot of times we are surprised that we even get a customer, if that makes sense?

Rita McGrath: Oh yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: What about the grocery industry? That’s one that’s always kind of puzzled me because people have been talking about grocery delivery, like the Amazon of groceries, for a long time.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: And while I think some inroads have been made, and certainly with Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, that gives them some sort of platform to come from, but it seems like that one, nobody has been able to crack.

Rita McGrath: Well, yeah, I think so, because buyers fall into very, very different customers segments when it comes to food. One of the things I predicted that these meal kit companies, the Blue Aprons, and those kinds of companies, that the supermarkets were going to do to them, what they did to Boston Chicken. I mean, you may remember how hyped up that was years ago. What ended up happening was all the supermarkets said, hang on, we can do rotisserie chicken. You must be kidding. Shortly after Amazon bought Whole Foods, I was in our local one, and lo and behold, there are Amazon meal kits ready to be picked up and taken home.

Rita McGrath: To come back to your major question though, I think one of the reasons groceries is so hard, is that there’s always going to be a segment of people that really want to pick out what they consume. I also think that the better grocery retailers, and here I’m thinking of Wegman’s and Kroger, they’ve actually made the shopping journey better, it’s more up to date, you go in and you’re surprised, because don’t forget, a lot of people don’t know exactly what they want to buy when they go in the store right, they’re going in to see what looks fresh, or what do I feel like, or is it pasta salad tonight? And you can’t really replicate that experience online.

John Jantsch: Yeah, no, I totally agree. You’re right though. I think some of the better retailers, Whole Foods has a restaurant and a bar, it’s become a community place where they actually have live music on Fridays –

Rita McGrath: Wow.

John Jantsch: – so they’re really trying to do, I think they are trying to, as you to your point, change the experience.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: I think actually that’s a great point because I think some businesses that were kind of old school-ish, I’m thinking the local bookstore that, for all intent and purposes got put out of business by first, the big boxes, and then the online. But the ones that have hung in there have changed the experience-

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: – and that’s what’s kept them, not being about the books but being about the community for example. I think that’s a small scale example, I think that that people could look at too, is as you’re getting ready to get put out of business, then what is the experience change that could happen, that would then sort of make the big box or whoever you’re competing with kind of irrelevant.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I agree. I mean a stellar example of this is Best Buy. Best Buy was given up for dead 15 years ago because everybody was talking about show-rooming, oh you just go in the store, you do all your shopping, right, and then you order online for cheaper. What Hubert Joly said was, wait a minute, there’s things we can do because we have a brick and mortar place that nobody in ecommerce can match, and so we have the Geek Squad, and we have the Home Advisor program, and he basically said to the Sony’s and Microsoft’s of the world, you want to be in a Best Buy? Great. You pay rent for the privilege, I’m not buying inventory from you people. He really changed, I’d say the power dynamics among that kind of retail.

John Jantsch: That probably goes into your example, of kind of what to do about it, right? I mean that it’s not just merely a matter of saying, okay, we’re going to muscle up and fight this thing, it’s actually to make a fundamental shift, isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing people often overlook is something that Clay Christiansen who recently passed away, called the jobs to be done. What we forget is nobody gets up in the morning and buys a product or service because they want to right. In very rare cases, they buy it because there’s some problem or goal that they want to meet in their lives. What we forget is that my consideration set for how I get that problem addressed could involve many things across many industries, and so people get so wedded to this is how we do things, and this is how my industry’s always been constructed, that we forget that, and we don’t pay attention when customers flee for something else.

John Jantsch: Gosh, I preach that all the time. A company that, say cuts down trees or something in a local market, the problem they actually solve is that they show up when they say they’re going to and they clean up the job site. Everybody assumes they can take the tree down, and I think a lot of people forget that that’s what people are actually buying.

Rita McGrath: Absolutely. A great example is the whole batch of direct to consumer companies, such as Dollar Shave Club as an example, or Casper, or Wayfair. The product itself may not be as good, I mean I would imagine Dollar Shave Club doesn’t have all the advanced technology that a Gillette would have, but you know, you don’t have to go to a store, you don’t have to deal with the fortress where the razors are locked up, you don’t have to run out. It’s just all these other parts of the experience are so much better. We might even be cool with an inferior product.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I have millennial children and they’re all in love with Casper, and I don’t think it’s as much about the product as it is the convenience, and they love their marketing, they love their message, they love how fun they are.

Rita McGrath: Yeah.

John Jantsch: In some ways I’m not even sure that they’re analyzing is this a better mattress?

Rita McGrath: No. Well, and the other thing that companies like Casper have done is, conventionally a mattress was something you lived with for 15 or 20 years, so it was a really high risk, high involvement purchase. What Casper has done is brought the price and the risk down low enough that we’re like, all right, if I use it for three years and buy another one, I’ll just do that. So this trend of sort of using things very quickly and then replenishing them is something that they’ve played into, I think.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and if you live on the 11th floor of a New York apartment, they found a way to get a mattress inside a little box.

Rita McGrath: Right, right.

John Jantsch: Is there one inflection point coming that anybody who’s in that industry, you would like to tell them they need to do something about it?

Rita McGrath: Well I’d say this is one that cuts across all industries. You may remember the years, at the end of the 90s when we were transitioning from dial-up modems to always on high speed internet. What that allowed was the emergence of ecommerce as we know it today, it allowed the voice on demand services that we take for granted from companies like Netflix and so on, it allowed blah, blah, blah. It did completely change the game in terms of how people related to digital offerings.

Rita McGrath: I think 5G is going to have a similar inflection-y kind of effect. Because if you think about it, if you have true 5G the way it’s being talked about, and it’s probably going to take longer than everybody thinks, but when it comes right, you’re going to be getting rid of limited bandwidth, you’re going to be getting rid of modems, you’re going to have more real time responsiveness, fun, all kinds of devices. I think it’s going to be that kind of change, like the shift from dial-up to true, always on internet. It’s going to be the same as the shift from sort of wifi, and routers, and 4G, to this 5G world.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I where people sometimes miss that, is that once people start experiencing that, then they expect it from everything.

Rita McGrath: Exactly.

John Jantsch: And that’s where people get caught, isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: Well, look at all those dead internet service providers and the modems that they used to dial up.

John Jantsch: Yeah awesome. Well Rita, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find out more about your work and pick up a copy of Seeing Around Corners?

Rita McGrath: Oh, I’d love them to do that. Well, so my website is RitaMcGrath.com, I know hugely inventive name. So it’s RitaMcGrath.com, and there you can check out my upcoming events. I have a newsletter archive, I have a monthly newsletter that I do every month, and what I do each month, if your listeners are interested in inflection points is I take a different sector of the economy each month and write about what I see as the trends that they should be paying attention to. This month is about holiday shopping and how it’s changed. We’ve done construction, we’ve done advertising, we’ve done a number of industries. You can find the whole archive collection on my website.

John Jantsch: We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Rita McGrath: Terrific.

John Jantsch: Rita, thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Rita McGrath: That would be great. See you then.

Finding Happiness at Work

Finding Happiness at Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Bruce Daisley
Podcast Transcript

Bruce Daisley headshot Today’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is author and podcaster Bruce Daisley.

After a career as a senior executive at Twitter and Google, Daisley changed his trajectory. He left the corporate world to begin a podcast called Eat Sleep Work Repeat.

Daisley managed teams in his corporate life and became interested in what it is that makes us happy and fulfilled at work. He noticed that there was an awful lot of research out there about how to improve our work lives, but most of that research never makes its way to the people who actually are working in an office every day.

That’s why he wrote Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job, which he sees as a cookbook to improve your workplace culture. If you’re looking for the ingredients that can help boost morale, increase productivity, and make your team a happier group of people, this book can help you do it.

On this episode of the podcast, we discuss some of the hacks from the book and take a closer look at the research behind finding happiness at work.

Questions I ask Bruce Daisley:

Has technology made work more stressful, or is that just an excuse?
Is company culture a myth?
What is “monk mode”?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

What it is that actually influences how people feel about the quality of their job.
The real science behind open plan offices, and why you shouldn’t build one.
Why laughter is important in any work environment—even (and maybe especially) in difficult and serious ones.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Bruce Daisley:

Listen to the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast
Pre-order a copy of Eat Sleep Work Repeat
Follow on Twitter
Connect on LinkedIn
Follow on Instagram

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team.

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Transcript of Finding Happiness at Work

Transcript of Finding Happiness at Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Gusto, modern, easy payroll benefits for small businesses across the country. And because you’re a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. Find out at gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Bruce Daisley. We’re going to talk about his new book, Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job. So Bruce, thanks for joining me.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch: So, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Eat Sleep Work Repeat meme on Reddit?

Bruce Daisley: I’m not, in fact. Get out of here. I chose the title based on a musical record, but go on.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say then, if you weren’t familiar with that then you’re probably not familiar with the song by the Ghost Years, I guess? Is that?

Bruce Daisley: No. So mine was based on, we was a attract by the EDM artist Fat Boy Slim that Calvin Harris, the other EDM artist remixed, and it’s an interesting one. It’s sort of got along winding lyric that’s like a story, and it’s about a gentleman who finds himself constantly out at the club. And the song is called Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat. So that was going through my head on one long commute and I changed it to Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat for my podcast, and then subsequently my book.

John Jantsch: Well there’s actually a song by that name, Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, by a little known band, I’m guessing called the Ghost Years. So, now you’ll have to look all this stuff up. I’ve given you lots of homework.

Bruce Daisley: Amazing. Am I going to be looking at a lawsuit here? Like the Ghost Years are hitting me with a writ?

John Jantsch: I suppose it depends if they’re still together.

Bruce Daisley: What a way to start my day. Suddenly, I find myself in litigation. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch: So Eat Sleep Work Repeat was not all you’ve ever done in your life. I know it’s been a few years for you, but this is actually a bit of a departure from your previous career, isn’t it?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, that’s right. I’ve just, this second, just a couple of weeks ago left, I was a vice president at Twitter for eight years, and then prior to that, I worked at Google, at YouTube for another five years. So yeah, I was sort of a senior exec at technology firms before turning my hand to this.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I may have this wrong, but this book, depending upon when people are listening to this, is coming out towards the end of February in 2020. But this is actually a retitle of this book, right? It was originally called or The Joy of Work.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, it was The Joy Of Work, in the UK and I zinged up with far fewer parochial English stories, and I’ve added some exciting US stories. Because it did quite well in the UK. I see it as like a cookbook for anyone who wants to improve their workplace culture.

Bruce Daisley: So say if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, “There’s just something not quite right in my team”. And it might be that you’re the boss, or that you might be someone far more junior, but you just want to get things right. When I had that same curiosity, I discovered there were books and books and academic papers of research, done into how we can improve work. And yet, strangely none of it reaches any of us in jobs. So, became my focus. What could any of us do to use the science and the research available to improve our jobs? So that’s it. It’s a cookbook to improve the dynamic in our teams.

John Jantsch: So, I hear a lot of people blaming technology. You worked for a couple of those technology companies, that’s adding to some of the stress and disruption and whatnot. Do you think that, that’s really the case or is that just an excuse? Have things really gotten worse?

Bruce Daisley: Well, the unavoidable truth is that irrespective of whether technology is to blame, and I think the answer by the way is partly, but irrespective of whether the technology is to blame the technology we now have is the technology we need to deal with. It’s a little bit like, we’ve just joined election season and people say, “Oh, well I preferred it in this era, when this happened. I preferred it in this era and when this happened”. Sadly, we don’t pick and choose the era we live through. And so, the technology and the way that people are using the technology around us is just now something that we need to deal with. We can’t romantically imagine a more simple era because, simultaneous with us transplanting ourselves back to 19th century Britain, and imagine ourselves working in these archaic environments that we might see in a film. Simultaneously, there were a lot of other problems.

Bruce Daisley: So, the place we’re in, definitely technology contributes to the way that a lot of us feel overwhelmed by odd jobs. No doubt.

John Jantsch: Yeah. We don’t have to build our homes and kill our food, do we?

Bruce Daisley: Exactly that. And we’ve got antibiotics, we’ve got penicillin, we’ve got all manner of things. So, let’s count some of our blessings at the very least.

John Jantsch: A lot of organizations, especially in Silicon Valley, it seems, one of my kids actually works out in Silicon Valley and her job title is one of these, like head of hugging or something like that. I’m just teasing her. But a lot of these companies are getting these people that are in charge of the culture, for example. And I think there’s actually an era of personal accountability to your book, that sort of says, and I think you actually blatantly say culture is kind of a myth.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. Well certainly I believe company culture is a myth. I believe that the idea that you can get a consistent feeling between the Chicago office, the Denver office, the New York office, and for it to be precisely the same, mandated on PowerPoint slides. Sadly, it would be wonderful if that were the case, but it’s simply not the case.

Bruce Daisley: So company culture is something of a myth. Team culture is far more realistic. And the truth of that is that people can find themselves working in adjacent teams in the same office, and have a very different experience at work. You might occasionally chat to someone in the lunch hall or on the way home, and you’ll say to someone “How’s it going?” And their experience can be completely different to yours.

Bruce Daisley: So I think generally, when we discover these good working environments, they generally exist at a team level. That’s not to say that companies can’t aspire to these things, but they need to be realistic in terms of what they can control.

John Jantsch: Yeah, because most employees, especially at larger organizations, their experience of the company is their boss or their team leader or whatever. So, that’s probably who’s dictating more about the culture than anyone else in the organization to that person.

Bruce Daisley: Very much so. People say when you try and identify if people have a good job, the fundamental thing that determines whether people think they have a good job is whether they have a good manager. So, managers have a huge bearing.

Bruce Daisley: Now, you might work for a company that’s giving you free perks and benefits. They might be providing you with a free smoothie, one Wednesday a month, but if you’ve got a wretched manager, then generally you think you’ve got a bad job.

John Jantsch: Yeah, for sure. You pick on another one, that I think is a falling out of favor. But there was a period of time when everybody was building these 200 people in one room, all sitting across each other from a table, and now we’re all going to be able to communicate better. Most people I know that work in those environments spend a great deal of their time trying to find some peace and quiet. You take on the open plan office as one of, maybe worse than social media, as far as a distraction?

Bruce Daisley: Well, more than anything else, I think a lot of us recognize the experience of thinking that we go to work early to get something done, or we feel like we can never get anything done because we’re beset with all these never-ending interruptions and meetings and emails and the open plan office … The day I discovered, sort of a veteran work, but the day I discovered that the science of open plan offices was so atrocious, it just was this revelation to me. So let me share with you John, the secrets of open plan offices.

Bruce Daisley: Number one, the biggest change that happens when organizations move to an open plan office is that the ratio of people who hate their colleagues goes up by 75%. So, if you’ve ever found yourself driven to distraction by the woman who sits behind you or the guy who sits next to you, then you’ll know that, actually that’s a regular occurrence with open plan offices.

Bruce Daisley: The strange thing about open plan offices is normally when we’re sold into them, people paint these beautiful pictures of accidental conversations and creativity, people sort of spontaneously coming up with new ideas. And in fact, what you discover is the next biggest thing that changes, is the volume of email goes up by two thirds. So really strange. That feeling where you’re emailing someone who sits three desks away from you, simply because we have so many more interruptions in those environments than we ever did in smaller offices.

John Jantsch: Yeah. It’s almost like taking employees and making them roommates at the same time, because they’re on top of each other all day long.

Bruce Daisley: No. Look, I’m pretty sure that will never escape open plan offices. But the organizations who seem to be making the best go of it are the ones that seem to be saying, “Okay, maybe you’ve got a laptop, we’re going to allow you to have quiet spaces where you can go and work”.

Bruce Daisley: In fact, if you chat to people who work in coworking spaces, the people who run coworking spaces so that people spend more time in their in the anonymous social sort of coffee bar style spaces, than they do at their allocated workstation.

Bruce Daisley: And it’s a good reminder, actually, we’re not uncomfortable with a bit of noise around us, but we hate it when that noise constantly interrupt us.

John Jantsch: Yeah. It’s funny, I, like you have written, actually, I’ve written six books. And I have written the book of them in coffee shops. I actually enjoy the noise. But to your point, nobody speaks to me. It’s just the noise around me. Some people can’t do that at all, but there is a difference, I think.

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John Jantsch: All right. Let’s talk about, since your book has a number in it, 30 hacks for bringing joy to your job. Let’s talk about a couple of them. The very first one is one that I’ve done for years, and it’s a this idea of monk mode. So do you want to unpack that one?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. The idea of monk mode is that, strangely, we seem to find that, firstly the whole of work is something of an illusion. The idea that maybe we’re going to work 40 hours a week, that each of those 40 hours is as equally productive as each other. We imagine that we’ve got a five by eight grid of those hours, and that each one of them will be equally valuable. And what we discover when we actually plunge into measuring what people work and what they achieved is that these are not equally as productive.

Bruce Daisley: So what you discover then is that our secret is unless we’re going to work longer and longer, and that seems to be one of the unfortunate mistakes that a lot of us make, but if we’re not going to work longer and longer, working out when the good stuff is, it seems to be a pretty vital component. So when are the sociable hours? When are the productive hours? And it seems that for most of us, our most productive hours are in the morning.

Bruce Daisley: So one of the one the hacks that a number of people have found real benefit from is almost carving out a time before we open our emails, a time before we turn our podcasts. Maybe twice a week where we carve out, I met one guy who called it his most important thing, he called it his MIT, and he would write on his board every day, what was his MIT. And he wouldn’t do anything else until he’d finished the 90 minutes that his MIT had taken him.

Bruce Daisley: But this monk mode morning, this idea that like a monk, we have no interruptions and we focus on something, is one of the hacks that I’ve seen to be most effective. And the strange thing about the monk mode morning is that we can accomplish in uninterrupted time, far more than we ever realized.

Bruce Daisley: So one of the things that I’ll be guilty of is I know that I’m going somewhere in three weeks and an I need to write a presentation, but I’ve known this for a long time and it’s sat at the top of my to do list. And yet, when I come to actually do it, as long as I don’t have 50 other browser tabs open, as long as I don’t have too much other distraction, actually, a really productive hour can make a big dent in that. And so, that’s the idea of monk mode, removing these distractions, removing these punctuations and actually getting to focus our energies on something seems to be one of the best ways to get more out of our time.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I suspect we all underestimate how much weight that presentation that you had to make was actually causing on the rest of your thinking and the rest of your focus because you were putting it off. You knew you had to do it, it was causing stress. I think that’s probably a really underestimated element of that.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. You know that thing that’s sort of dogs your to do list? That you see sitting there. I promised I’d get back, I promised I’d get back, I promised I’d get back. And over time, it’s becoming more and more of a burden on you. And that’s it. Sometimes to say, right … I’ve seen a couple of people who say, “I can’t carve out 90 minutes every day, but I’m going to do 60 minutes, twice a week”. So it’s finding whatever works for you, but what you often discoveries those 60 minutes, twice a week, can be the most productive gaps on your calendar.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think if we’re all being honest, and we did assign a dollar value to each hour that we spent every day, that probably the 80% of our money is made in 20% of our work, or the old saying.

Bruce Daisley: Absolutely. Well here’s the strange thing. How I found myself self doing this. I’m not sure if you identify with this, but I was coming home, I used to have a day, on Mondays, which was laden with meetings. I had seven hours of meetings on Monday. And I would come home and my inbox would be creaking because of all of the email, and I’d feel, “Wow. It’s the start the week and I’m already hours behind”.

Bruce Daisley: And I used to sit every Monday night at my kitchen table, sometimes with a cup of tea, sometimes with a glass of wine, always with some sort of music playing or TV playing. And I once took stock of the fact that I’d spent three or four hours, sitting at this kitchen table and I took stock of how little I’d actually done. And I thought, after an exhausting day, you’ve added to your tiredness by sitting at that table for four hours. You should have just switched off, watched some TV, gone to bed early. Instead you sat at that kitchen table for four hours. So tomorrow, you wake up even more tired.

Bruce Daisley: I think that’s the critical thing. Being more honest about what we’re actually doing and what we’re giving ourselves the illusion we’re doing is an important step on fixing these problems.

John Jantsch: So one of the hacks that I wasn’t going to cite, but since you mentioned it, sleep. Better sleep, more of it is a hack, isn’t it? That we need to adopt?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, very much so. The reason why I feel so strongly about it, I set off, I had this maybe sort of patriarchal desire to make the people who were working for me happier. Whether it’s my responsibility to make them happier or not, I don’t know. But, they looked so miserable that I was intent on trying to bring some smiles back to their little faces. And I set about trying to make people happy.

Bruce Daisley: And what I discovered when I was doing extensive reading on happiness was that there are two things that make us happier, full stop, period. There are the two things that make us happy. And so I thought, well, okay, let’s at least cover these. The number one thing that makes us happier is to sleep more. And sleeping seven and a half to eight hours sleep a night makes us more happy.

Bruce Daisley: In fact, if you were to measure this, Prozac achieves a a 1.8 shift on the 51 point depression scale that this created. A good night’s sleep moves us eight points. So, a good night’s sleep, be sure of four or five times better than Prozac. So sleep is by far the best thing that any of us could do.

Bruce Daisley: The second, I’m not sure how helpful this is, but the second way to make yourself happier is to spend time with happier friends. And the more we spend time with happier people, it does appear to have an impact on our own happiness, our own psyche.

Bruce Daisley: So, that old mum wisdom that used to be sort of surround yourself with positive, happy people. There seems to be some clear benefit to what your mama told you.

John Jantsch: So, you’ve broken up the hacks into personal and team and then leader. I’ve written a book recently that has has 366 separate pages, thoughts. It’s a day a page. And so, I always get the question in my interviews, what’s your favorite one? And I’m like, you want me to pick one of those as my favorite page? But you only have 30, so I’m going to ask you. Did you have a favorite hack?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, very much so. So here’s what I set about doing. I set about thinking, how can I make work better? How can I make these miserable souls I’m surrounded with look like the less burdened. I wanted them whistling on their way to work. So what I discovered very quickly is that there are a lot of things that companies do wrong, and some of the things that companies do wrong intentionally and some of the things that companies do wrong unintentionally.

Bruce Daisley: But I found myself reflecting on all of the management, all of the advice I’d ever got. And there was one image that was indelibly in my head, and it was the sanction, it was the scolding of a former boss, who’d said to me once, “Now’s not the time to be seen laughing”. And we were in a particularly unfortunate time, things were tough at work and he said, “Please don’t be seen laughing when the big boss walked past”.

Bruce Daisley: So it stuck in my head. And as I was there thinking, right, this is the time to research what’s the rights and wrongs of work, I thought, well, I must investigate this one. And truthfully, I was thinking, I was just going to lay out the science of why he was right, and then get back to the other things that we could do. And what I discovered was that the science of laughter is far more emphatic in what it advises, and it points very resolutely in the opposite direction to what he said.

Bruce Daisley: So he said, “Now’s not the time to be seen laughing”, which I guess suggests, in bad times we don’t want to be frivolous, we don’t want to be distracted. We may be don’t want to be unfocused. But if we look at people who have prevailed in difficult times, very often it’s humor that characterizes their behavior.

Bruce Daisley: If we wanted to go back to Churchillian maxims, “Keep calm and carry on”, and the whole blitz spirit that my country men had, was very much anchored on sort of an irreverent humor. But we also see through army deployments. Servicemen will characterize their time as being filled with laughter. Firefighters often describe the laughter that fills some of there really intense moments. And so laughter seems to have this incredible capacity to reset our resilience, for sort of helping us to feel more able to deal with stark problems that we’re faced with.

Bruce Daisley: So anyway, I found myself really charmed with the science of laughter.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And that ends up as a hack in … I probably won’t be able to find it. It’s just called Laugh. Okay. There you go. Awesome.

John Jantsch: So Bruce, tell us where we can find Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, and more about you. I know you have a podcast by the same name as well.

Bruce Daisley: Exactly that. So I’ve got a podcast, you’ll find it’s eatsleepworkrepeat.com, if you go to that podcast, I’ve tried to interview some of the leading psychologists, neuroscientists who’ve done work in this field. So, any of us who maybe find ourselves trying to build the culture in our kid’s soccer team or in our own workplaces. Or maybe we’ve got our own company and we want it to be the place that we always dreamed of working. That was my mission. How could I make this into 30 very simple interventions that are proven to work?

John Jantsch: Well, Bruce, thanks for joining us. And we’ll have a links to the book and links to Bruce’s podcast and website in the show notes. So hopefully, I’ll run into you. I assume you’re going to spend some time in the States, promoting the book.

Bruce Daisley: I am. Yeah. I’m in New York in the last week of February. I’m in SF and then Austin in early March, and then back in the summer. So yeah, absolutely. All my events on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road, Bruce.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you so much for having me.

Navigating Small Business Legal Issues in the Digital World

Navigating Small Business Legal Issues in the Digital World written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jamie Lieberman
Podcast Transcript

Jamie Lieberman headshot Today’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jamie Lieberman, Esq, founder of Hashtag Legal.

Lieberman started her legal career more than 15 years ago in New York City, where she worked as a commercial litigator for a major global firm and for a Federal District Judge on criminal and civil cases.

But she never felt like the traditional law path was the right fit for her, so she decided to leave her job. While getting a handle on her freelance law career, she started blogging. She had previously run a blog about life in New York City that had gained a following, and she returned to the world of blogging just as some bloggers were beginning to make money (in the pre-influencer world).

She worked for a company that ran conferences for bloggers, who asked her to give a talk on legal issues that bloggers face. That talk was the seed that blossomed into Hashtag Legal. Her firm is now an all-female, virtual law office focused on serving influencers, creatives, entrepreneurs, service providers, and marketers.

Today on the podcast, Lieberman discusses the ins and outs of internet law, from how to draw up a contract that protects creatives but keeps their clients happy, to how small businesses should navigate privacy laws like GDPR.

Questions I ask Jamie Lieberman:

What led you to found Hashtag Legal?
People are used to hiring a lawyer when something bad happens; are there things small business owners should do proactively before things go wrong?
Where do you see legal issues popping up with respect to employees?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to create a contract that doesn’t scare off your clients.
Where small business owners often run into legal issues.
How privacy laws like CCPA and GDPR really affect small businesses.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Jamie Lieberman:

Learn more about Jamie Lieberman and Hashtag Legal
Listen to The FearLess Business Podcast
Follow on Twitter
Connect on LinkedIn
Email Jamie directly

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr.

Zephyr is a modern, cloud-based CMS that’s licensed only to agencies. The system is lightweight, easy to use, and incredibly fast. And with an array of beautiful themes to choose from, you can get your clients’ websites up-and-running quickly and with less effort. Or, if you’d rather build a custom site, Zephyr includes agency services to be your plug-and-play dev shop.

Zephyr is passionate about helping agencies create great websites for their clients. To learn more, go to Zephyrcms.com.