John Jantsch (00:09): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Micah Solomon. He’s an expert on customer service, hospitality, and the customer experience. He’s a bestselling author, consultant trainer, e-learning trainer, producer, training producer. It’s a lot of training and a keynote speaker, and we’re going to talk today about one of his newest books called Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever. So Micah, welcome back to the show.

Micah Solomon (00:46): It was so great to be with you last time and this is a pleasure to return.

John Jantsch (00:51): So let’s get right down to it. Define anticipatory customer experience.

Micah Solomon (00:57): The basic, I guess, equation for customer service is you ask for something, I give it to you assuming you paid, but anticipatory customer service is another level. It’s where I am serving even the unexpressed needs and wishes that you may have. And it’s a great way to bind customers to you to make them feel like this is my place.

John Jantsch (01:23): Yeah, I mean, we’ve probably hopefully all been at a restaurant. That’s an example I love to use, where the server brought something you didn’t even ask for because they knew you were getting, I mean, simple as water, right? I mean, you didn’t have to ask for it. They thought, well, you’ve drank your water, you’re going to want more, and they bring it. I mean, that’s a pretty simple example, right?

Micah Solomon (01:42): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (01:44): Go for it. I was going to pile on now using more words out of the subtitle itself. There would be some that would suggest that no matter how great your service is, loyalty is dead. I’ll let you hit that one out of the park.

Micah Solomon (01:57): Well, if you believe that, then it is right. The thing to remember is in the olden days we would talk about customer lifetime value,

John Jantsch (02:08): And

Micah Solomon (02:08): I think it is hard to prove that figure now because John, as you pointed at it, is a lot easier to switch vendors. So I’ll suggest you think about something called customer network value. So if you’re delighting a customer, you number one, get their business and you number two, get all their recommendations. So it’s a pretty big deal.

John Jantsch (02:35): It’s almost like thinking of providing great customer experience, great customer service as a referral tactic almost. Right?

Micah Solomon (02:43): Absolutely. I like to say customer service is the new marketing.

John Jantsch (02:48): Yeah. And I remember from our last conversation, I know this is something you’ve done for years, but you start this book out with your secret shopper role. Talk little bit about how you’ve done that. I mean, maybe even just give a story about doing it like you do in the book. I’ll be happy to. You need to put a disguise on though, right? First,

Micah Solomon (03:10): Do you want to show that picture? That’d be funny. I can grab it. Hang on. So this is one of the more extreme disguises I might or might not use. So I don’t mystery shop anyone except my customers and they ask me to do it because they want to know an overall feeling I’m getting for the service. So I start out with this wonderful day that I’m having at a five star resort, one of the greatest places in America, and I wake up on the 33,000 thread count Egyptian pizzas, and I head down to the spa and all the while I’m making notes. Now the spa’s a little tricky because to make notes on my iPhone or whatever it is while they’re facially me is a little challenging, but it’s nice work if you can get it. At the end of the day, I order room service and one of my tests is I ask them for cocoa not to hot, and only the best people will get that. Most hotels won’t even notice the instructions. The ones who do either forget to do it or they give me this ridiculous, it seems like they cooled it down with ice. So the not too hot, I mean it’s because it’s my Goldilocks challenge. Then when I’m done, I send my confidential report to the c e o or whoever the boss of the division is and they can make use of it.

John Jantsch (04:38): So do you ever find, and again, I know you’ve done that for years, right? I mean that’s something you’ve kind of made one of your sort of signature applications. How’d you get into this work? I mean, I think a lot of people you’ve sort of specialized in one aspect of it. I think a lot of people customer experience got some talk in marketing, but it’s not seen as a whole area. How did you come to find this to be your life’s calling?

Micah Solomon (05:05): So there are two stories, two explanations, and both of them are true. So the PR friendly one is, I created a manufacturing company. This is some years ago, and our widgets were no better than anyone. They were also no worse. So as time went on, I realized that what differentiated ourselves was the customer experience. So when I sold the manufacturing company, I thought, well, this is what I do. And I called a friend of mine, Leonardo, who did all of this stuff on the hospitality side, and I had done all of it on the business to business and so forth side, and I said, Hey, all this, I know all this. Let’s write a book together. And he said, no, I think I’m going to write my own book sometime. So I was like, okay, good luck with that. So maybe a couple months later I call back and I say, Hey, Leonardo has that book coming.

(05:58): And he’s like, oh, this is how optimistic, let’s say he was. He says, I think I’m going to go off one day and write it all. So I was like, okay, good luck. One minute later he gets back on the phone and he sounds like he has his tail between his legs and he says, Micah Solange overheard my side of the conversation and she said, you absolutely have to write that book with Micah clearly not getting around to it yourself. So that was my first book, exceptional Service, exceptional Profit. It was co-authored by the two of us, and I kept learning more and more things, writing more and more books, working with more and more companies, and that’s what I do. So that is the PR friendly official story. The other story is he was born, or at least from a very early age as an excessively particular person. So in the book, I have a reconstructed letter from my counselors at camp, which tells you a lot, and it’s something like, dear Mr. And Mrs. Solomon, we have had the arduous pleasure of having your son Micah at summer camp. Usually the suggestions and complaints we get are along the lines of that old Hello Mata, hello father song where it’s raining too much and there are alligators in the pot and everything.

John Jantsch (07:18): She silverstein, right?

Micah Solomon (07:20): Yeah. And so one of those guys, I think his one that’s similar is I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, which is a great one also. But Micas were much more specific in advance. They were like the two whistles at the waterfront aren’t quite in tune with each other. The sloppy joes doesn’t pair well with the orange juice and the mess hall and so forth. We have enjoyed having Micah for this summer, but we were also happy to return him to your care.

John Jantsch (07:48): So that’s when you didn’t realize it at the time, but that was your signal that you were meant for this. So I actually find that Google reviews are really helpful because not just as a consumer, certainly they’re helpful for that. Somebody’s got terrible reviews, you don’t go there. But as a marketer, I really find them helpful because the words that people actually use voluntarily really say a lot about what’s going on at that business. However, no matter how good a business is, you see everybody gets one and two star reviews for some reason, and maybe it’s deserved every now and then it’s deserved, but sometimes people are just odd. You’re never going to make everybody happy. Nothing is truer than that. So what do you suggest people do? I guess I’m asking a two part question. Obviously with upset and unhappy customers, but then also just with unreasonable customers.

Micah Solomon (08:45): So I spend a lot of time in the book with the first category customers who are upset, unhappy, frustrated, and I have a service recovery framework which all great companies have, whether it’s Nordstrom or whether it’s Carleton or Zappos, mine, which I’m kind of famous for spells mama m a, and the reason it spells mama, actually going back to Leonardo, my co-author, he’s Italian through and through. So we’re talking about how companies tend to be too legalistic when they’re trying to work with us. They’re like just the facts and blah, blah, blah. And we said, well, why don’t we make it sound like your mother or a quintessential Italian mother? And he said, well, my mom’s really not the right model. She was kind of tough, but let’s say this stereotype. And she’s like, oh my bambino, you hurt, you’re ouchie. Let me put a bandaid on it. Maybe here’s a lollipop. Rather than just the facts ma approach where we’re like, let me see, young man, were you wearing the crop

John Jantsch (09:46): Protective

Micah Solomon (09:46): Head gear before you had it out and so forth. So the first thing is to make time to listen. We are all such good troubleshooters that we kind of think we know the solution before our customer has even spoken. So let them vent and then it has some different aspects, but basically agree with your customer what you’re going to do and by when, and then do it. Now I think if you look at the unreasonable Google reviews or TripAdvisor, a high percentage of them are from people who never or customers. That’s

John Jantsch (10:18): So true.

Micah Solomon (10:20): If I get a one-star review for my book, which thank goodness I haven’t yet, it can be like, I ordered this from Amazon and they said it was out of stock,

John Jantsch (10:30): Right? I’ve gotten some bad reviews. It’s like the cover came in tattered. Well, you bought it from a third party, it was used. That’s, it’s really rough. So

Micah Solomon (10:40): If they’re a semi reasonable person and if you are able to figure out how to reach them,

John Jantsch (10:45): Then

Micah Solomon (10:45): Work with them. And when it’s all over, personally, I have no problem saying, Hey, do you think you could update that review? And some people will, and some people are just so lazy that they won’t. Now, I will tell you, some of my clients, or even people just friends of mine operate, let’s say a restaurant and they call me and they say, Hey Micah, I just, it’s horrible review, and I’m sure it was my competitors down the street. So I’m like,

John Jantsch (11:07): Okay,

Micah Solomon (11:07): Lemme look at the review. But it’s so specific. Clearly this is someone who’s eaten at the restaurant. So I’m like, it’s never the restaurant down the street, just like on the show a Sherlock, it’s never twins. The solution is never that. There’s two twins with the same

John Jantsch (11:23): Characters.

Micah Solomon (11:24): So by and large, it’s not your competitor. Certainly there are famous examples where it is, there is this horrible thing. The Mark is a wonderful hotel in New York, and there was this kid who was very, very abusive to them and started this social media campaign against it. But those are really, except

John Jantsch (11:41): Yes, I actually over the years, had a business one star review and it was like, that’s the competitor’s wife. It was a construction company. It was very obvious that it was, and Google to their credit removed it. But yeah, it is goofy what people do. Oh my goodness. You talk a lot about, and I know a lot of people who talk about customer experience being a real competitive advantage, particularly in one of those where it’s like, you sell this, they sell that you’re about the same price. You’re about to say price. I mean, talk a little bit about that idea of really viewing it as a profit center almost, or certainly as a true competitive advantage.

Micah Solomon (12:19): So it’s getting very commoditized out there. So how do you distinguish yourself? Well, maybe you’re lucky and you have an astonishing product nobody else has. Maybe you have, let’s say suites that are literally over the water in Aura. So you can have a great location or the first frick location for gas station, but most of us don’t have that.

John Jantsch (12:41): Most

Micah Solomon (12:41): Of us, the default is that we’re pretty interchangeable with our competitors. So customers will leave because they found a better price because someone else has a better website or seriously for no discernible reason at all. So how do you get out of this? Well, you have to become memorable, and you could do that with amazing advertising and marketing. I don’t want to dismiss that, but the thing is that great marketing only resonates if it’s true, right? There have been campaigns that were really clever, but the reality of being that customer wasn’t like that.

John Jantsch (13:19): So

Micah Solomon (13:19): You got to get the customer experience and then they will be become ideally loyal. A loyal customer is less price sensitive, and believe it or not, they’re more forgiving of your minor foibles, believe it or not. And if something goes terribly wrong, they will give you the courtesy of reaching out to you. So they’re also more open to any line extensions you have and they will become an ambassador for your brand. They’ll do what I like to call word of thumb marketing on their phones. So loyalty is very valuable and the customer experience is one of the ways to get there.

John Jantsch (13:57): I know for a fact that you talked about less price sensitive. I mean, I know that in some cases I’m paying more, but I’m like, I don’t care because the cost of the hassle or the cost of not having them know my name when I come into the store to me is high and I’m not alone. I’ve seen surveys as high as 90% of people surveyed saying they’ll pay more for a better experience. What role does community feedback play? I mean, getting that feedback, just like you went in Secret Shop, you told the C e o, this and this, but what role to actively asking your customers, are they getting what? Could you do something better? Could you provide a better service? Do you advocate that?

Micah Solomon (14:41): Well, certainly you want to be surveying your customers, but you got to do it really quickly and you have to not hound them if they don’t want to

John Jantsch (14:50): Reply. In

Micah Solomon (14:52): Fact, and this may not be true anymore, but a few years ago, Ritz Carlton was not only the highest on chip advisor in the luxury category, they were highest in any category. And so she told me, well, our secrets are two when we do a great job. Number two, I never hound customers to leave a review. I never solicit that. I don’t have a thing on the counter saying, please leave a review. So the people that leave a reviews are really passionate about us.

(15:20): Now, if you are going to survey people, number one, 80% of surveys are written completely wrong. If you want to write a perfect survey, look in my book, it’s there. If you are so impious or cheap that you don’t want to buy my book, then I think the best thing to do, well, you probably don’t own Apple products either, but if you own a couple products, look at their surveys, they’re pretty good. So what makes a survey good? Well, number one, you want to ask the most important question first, how satisfied are you with that? Then you get to the itty bitty Diddy was a bathroom cleaner, so forth, because if you ask was the bathroom clean and oh my God, you have the most clean bathrooms ever, like McDonald’s pride itself on, then that’s going to tint the rest of the survey or especially the next question that you ask.

(16:09): Or if your toilets are horrible, that’s going to have excessive weight. So first, ask their overall impression, then get into the smaller areas that you want them to talk about. When we have five, or I heard a clever argument for having four or six levels, the idea of using four or six is that there is no middle point. So you can’t be lazy in your hands. Don’t give them 10 and don’t ask them on a scale of one to 100 because customers shouldn’t have to do math for you. And so there are a few, but one thing I would say is if you are surveying your customers leave at least one blank space where they can vent or they can give very specific feedback. So that’s tip number one. Tip number two is you’ve got to scan them right away because if you’ve got an really upset customer and they write all about that, you need to get back to them right away. You can’t wait until the end of the month when you’re batching these and reading them. And that’s a mistake that a lot of companies make.

John Jantsch (17:10): Yeah, it’s funny. I think most people can forgive a mistake taking care of what they can’t forgive is doing a really bad job of taking care of it or ignoring it. It just makes it even worse. We’ve gotten, I can’t believe, 19 minutes into the show and I haven’t said ai. That’s awesome. I haven’t said AI yet. Let’s talk a little bit about how you see AI impacting this kind of arm of the marketing world of experience and service.

Micah Solomon (17:37): Well, it’s both early days and boy, things are changing quickly. I have a triangular model of AI in customer service. So at one Vertex, I’m going to use up my geometry training in a moment. One vertex is the customer or the prospect, and the next is the agent, and the third one is the ai. So a customer can come in using the ai. In fact, the best search engines on websites are AI powered. That may take care of them. If it doesn’t, then they’ll reach out to an agent. But when they get there, the mistake is to think no more AI should be involved. The customer’s going to keep using ai. I mean, they’re going to go on the thing that my mom calls the Google and look around. I know it’s really funny if she’s not your mom and they’re going to keep looking at Google and the agent is going to keep using the ai. AI is great at turning a generalist agent into temporarily a specialist when they’re answering a call.

John Jantsch (18:33): Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean I’ve even heard reports of people saying that they’re able to really get less experienced agents, less trained agents necessarily who have the right sort of spirit, who now have all the answers at their disposal as though they’ve been there for years. So I think it’s a win for everybody. I appreciate you coming to by and spending a few minutes with us. How can people contact you, find out about your work? Obviously get a copy of the book, Micah.

Micah Solomon (18:57): So to reach me, you can come to my website or just Google my name, but it is the challenging extremely biblical name. So it’s Micah, m i c a h at Micah Solomon, m i c a h s o l o m o n.com. If you want to email me, there are no a’s in Solomon or my website is a little easier, it’s micahsolomon.com, but you can just use Google and misspell my name. They’ll get you to me. I’ll get you to just

John Jantsch (19:27): Customer service expert. There you go.

Micah Solomon (19:30): To buy my book. There’ll be a link on my site, which will give you a free sample right away, but if you go to Voldemort’s site, oh, I’m sorry, Amazon site. It’s there, it’s available. They are shipping it now, and you can read a pretty long and pretty fabulous sample there before you decide to buy it.

John Jantsch (19:46): Yeah, awesome. Well, Mike, it was great catching up with you, just having you spend a few minutes on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road soon.

John (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Chris Gillebeau. He is an entrepreneur, writer, travel enthusiast, speaker, and podcaster. He has visited almost every country in the world, works independently and, motivates people to do the same and live a rewarding life by following their passion. His blog, the Art of Non-Conforming, has more than 300 views per month, and he’s also a super, super longtime fan of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and Duct Tape Marketing. He wrote that, I’m just reading what he wrote. Okay. And more recently published his latest book, Gonzo Capitalism, how to Make Money in An Economy That Hates You. So Chris, welcome back to the show.

Chris (00:48): Thank you. It’s been too long. Thanks for having me back. I am a longtime fan of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and the Duct Tape Marketing Empire, in fact.

John (00:55): Well, I want to start with the fact that I was feeling pretty good today, but then I learned that the economy hates me, and so I’m kind of tell me, I

Chris (01:04): Dunno that it hates you, John. I dunno that it hates you because you work for yourself and you have always been kind of on the forefront of helping people navigate self-employment and entrepreneurship and such. I think the subtitle of the book, how the Economy Hates You or How to Make Money in That Environment, I think it relates to how a lot of people are feeling resentful and critical of a system that they believe has a small number of winners and a large number of losers. A lot of young people obviously are graduating college or university with a tremendous amount of debt and not necessarily something on the other end to help pay that off. And it’s not just young people, it’s like young people of all ages we could say, who aren’t able to afford a mortgage who’ve been priced out of this economy. So there’s a lot of resentment and at the same time, there are a lot of opportunities for people to do something for themselves. So I don’t know that the economy hates you, but it does hate a lot of people, or at least a lot of people perceive that.

John (02:05): Yeah. And so you, I mean, I suppose the bear you are poking is a traditional, go get a job, work for a company, get a salary, hopefully climb the corporate ladder or whatever that means. I mean, is that the economy or that model I guess that you’re suggesting is at fault or at least that people are still pursuing that model?

Chris (02:26): Well, I feel like I’ve been poking that bear for a while. I feel like what’s different or what’s new in the past few years, I feel that everything about power and money, the dynamics of power, the perception of money, that is what has shifted for so many people. And so there’s a whole renegotiation of the employer-employee contracts, both formally in some ways with all this increased interest in unions, but also informally just with people embracing the great resignation and quiet quitting. There’s a whole chapter in the book about people who are doing this over employed thing where they’re working multiple full-time jobs remotely without either employer knowing about it. So they are kind of taking matters into their own hands. And these are not low paid workers, just to be clear, these are professionals who are earning six figure incomes often more than once, not

John (03:17): Punching a clock for anybody. So that

Chris (03:20): Exactly.

John (03:21): Yeah.

Chris (03:21): Right. So I think there’s a lot of changes that I’m just kind of pointing to. I think the bear has been poked, whether by me or anybody else.

John (03:29): Would you say that this is a American issue? I know you spend a lot of time in places outside of America or I mean, is that sort of a part of what’s informing you in this and that you’ve seen it happen or you’ve seen it operating better in other places?

Chris (03:45): That’s a great question. I was just in Canada all last week and a lot of these issues resonate there as well. I’ve done lots of travel as mentioned. I feel like it’s a global issue. We’re so connected these days. Social movements might start in one place, but then kind of quickly extrapolate elsewhere and such. So I don’t know that I would say it’s particularly American. Maybe in some ways it’s magnified here just by population size and the number of people who are leaving in droves to do something different and such. But I think all over the world people have interest in these kinds of things.

John (04:16): Maybe a level of entitlement that exists here probably adds to the anxiety perhaps

Chris (04:21): Maybe. But I mean, you could kind of pick at that a little bit and say, okay, it’s entitlement, but is it really entitlement or is it more just a general expectation of investment? If I invest tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars in my education, is it reasonable to expect that I’m going to be able to use that in a way that’s going to hopefully pay that back at some point? And if I shouldn’t, maybe I should just adjust my expectations then. But if I adjust my expectations, then I should do something different.

John (04:53): I wasn’t really going to go down this path, but you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, so I want to delve into that a little bit. Should we not be going to college? I mean, should we not be sending our kids to college?

Chris (05:02): Oh, I mean, I think it depends on what you want to study, what you want to do in life. It’s not should or shouldn’t. I think it’s like should you blindly go to college without any other goal or path? Maybe if that’s your situation, maybe do something different. Take a gap year. That’s a wonderful thing for people traveling and doing different stuff or volunteering. There’s all kinds of opportunities.

John (05:22): Yeah. Well, I still don’t know what I want to do in life, so I can’t imagine that having that answer. Of course. So all good business books, you quote Nicki Minaj, I think, and you’re specifically, I think pointing to this novelty as currency. I wonder if you could unpack that one for us.

Chris (05:41): I think the quote from Nick Minaj is, if I’m fake, I ain’t noticed because my money, and I think during the pandemic in particular, we saw, we’ve talked about power a little bit, but in the money side there was more than a trillion dollars of stimulus money. And there are all these digital currencies that we’re launching all the time and people asking questions about what actually is money, John, if you and I create our own currency and then one other person comes along and buys it, have we then created a market of millions and millions of dollars worth of value, or is that all just completely made up and at what point does it become not made up if five people buy it, if 10 people buy it, and so on? So I think a lot of people are thinking differently about that. So that’s like if I’m fake, well, I don’t know. My money is not fake, or at least it’s as fake as anybody else’s money. It’s as real as anybody else’s money. So that’s some of what I’m trying to look at.

John (06:36): So in some ways, when I read, especially the examples that you cite in the book of people doing some really out of the box things, I mean, it feels like just an amplified continuation of your art, of nonconforming. I mean, you’ve really been talking about alternative ways to make a living for a long time, and a lot of them a hundred dollars startup, I mean, that was all about like, Hey, you don’t have to go this path. You can go this path. So has something changed particularly in the last three or four years that really gives it the Gonzo label?

Chris (07:09): I think there are two things. I think number one, the pace or the scale of it has changed. Things happen quicker. Now, I think you and I, for what, 15 years or so, we’re building up our email lists and hopefully we got a decent number of people on them, but now they’re lots of 15 year olds who have millions of followers on TikTok. And it just happens. It just happens so quickly. I told the story in the book about Miss Excel. You probably know her name’s Katt Norton. She’s selling these Microsoft Excel training courses and she’s making multiple millions of dollars from these courses. And this has been built up in a very, very quick period of time. So pace and scale I think is quite different. And the second thing is the decentralized nature of it, or at least the ability for some things to be decentralized.

(07:57): So like I say in the book, I’ve been doing e-commerce stuff for 25 years, or at least I used to do e-commerce, and when I started I was like 19 years old and I thought, oh, everything is for sale now. And this is so easy. This is free market for the whole world and such. But in a lot of ways it was still very centralized. You still had to have a merchant account from your bank. You had to go through various approvals and gatekeepers and such. It’d be able to take credit cards. And so I used to say on the internet, nobody cares if you’re a teenager, but you really had to have your parents or somebody helping you gain access to things. Whereas now there’s lots of networks with blockchain and other things where people can just do whatever they want and nobody, there isn’t somebody that’s giving approval or disapproval to certain things. And that’s true across venture capital and lots of other, it’s true across social movements. I look at some of that in the book as well. So decentralization is the second point.

John (08:53): So I think the cutting edge of folks that you talk about in this book and that I think are going to really take this book and go, yeah, I can go do something different, I think are a lot of individuals in many cases that are just, I don’t know, is exploiting the right word, exploiting the TikTok algorithm or universe that’s out there. Can, and maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself, but what would you advise what I would call more traditional businesses or even heaven forbid, enterprises could learn from essentially these new ways?

Chris (09:25): Yeah. Well, I mean on that exploiting point, I mean I think the algorithm exploits us. Mostly the exploitation is going the other way around. So if somebody’s able to figure out a tip or a trick or a hack or something that works, I think good for them. As for enterprises, I think the best enterprises are open to new ideas. They have their mission and their vision. I think that’s very important. I think it’s good to not just pursue every trend or tangent, but at the same time you want to recognize when the world changes. We have to change. And throughout history, there’ve been various shifts that have endured. There’s things that happened that are kind of small change, but then there’s the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution and such. And so I think this is kind of the money revolution in the sense that there is a little bit of a before and after and you can choose to remain blind to it.

(10:17): And people do that in times of change and that’s fine. But I think people who really want to thrive, and again, people can be leaders of an enterprise organization or a company, then they are kind of saying, okay, what are the skills I need to build for this new economy? I mean, AI is changing everything and we don’t want to drop everything in our business to focus on the latest thing. It could end up just being like the metaverse, but I don’t know, I think five years from now, things are going to be quite different than they are now. And so you want to adapt to that. You want to be open.

John (10:49): I do have some NFTs I’d like to sell you.

Chris (10:51): Do you really? Are they 95% off now?

John (10:54): So that does beg the question because a lot of people jump in, I don’t know if we’re going to call ’em early movers or whatever they are, but N F T five years ago, three years ago, you couldn’t talk to somebody without that being then it was crypto, you already dropped ai the conversation. So do you run the risk or does it matter of, I already mentioned novelty as currency. A lot of these ideas are novelty that will go away. So do we run the risk of chasing after the next thing instead of building something that maybe has some measure of legacy?

Chris (11:27): Sure. Yeah, no, it’s great. I think a couple of things. So most of my work is for individuals. It’s not for companies. I’m always thinking about that person out there, and if you know your life mission, first of all, I have great clarity on what I’m supposed to do and build, then I think you shouldn’t listen to anybody or pay attention to anything, just go and do that thing. But a lot of people are not in that place, and it takes a long time to come to that place. And so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to experiment and do different stuff. I also think with some of the stories in the book, there’s a story of the guy who’s a sleep flu and he gets paid to sleep or actually not sleep because people are waking him up throughout the night. This is being streamed on Twitch and he’s got this bedroom that he’s hooked up with all these digital distractions.

(12:12): He’s making $50,000 a month doing this, so is he going to be doing it for the rest of his life? Probably not. But number one, it’s $50,000 a month. He’s this young guy from Australia. That’s pretty cool. Number two, it’s a crazy story. He’s going to have the story for the rest of his life if he stops doing it tomorrow. He’s got this story. He’s built these skills. He’s learned about streaming. He’s learned how to build this whole thing where lights and sirens are attached to talk transactions and things. The skills that you acquire now, the foundation you build is going to be relevant. It is going to be relevant for whatever happens next.

John (12:43): Yeah, that’s a really great point. I mean, there’s learning in everything that we do, isn’t there?

Chris (12:48): Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the learning process is just as valuable as whatever the outcome is.

John (12:53): Chris, in many ways, your Gonzo capitalism play kind of started with your blog and with writing I think, and content has still today, obviously books or a big part of it, content today is still a big part of yours. Do you think content is one of those plays that really does have a very, very long life, that it’s certainly not over, it’s not done, it’s still something someone could jump into today?

Chris (13:15): Man, I hope so, John. I mean, because that’s my world. That’s our world. I mean, I’m kind of biased there because that’s what want to write books and make the podcast. And I mean, that to me is I still think that valuable messages are worth sharing and can reach an audience for sure.

John (13:32): If somebody were going to jump into it. I mean, a lot of times people will say, well, you got in when it was hot thing and you built your audience. But if I wanted to start the day, what would I have to do?

Chris (13:43): Yeah. I mean, I guess I feel like on that point, everything I’ve started, I always felt like I was late when I started blogging. I thought I was really late because I saw a bunch of people that had been doing it before me. And when I started the podcasts or the podcast, it’s just one of them. I started six years ago and I was like, man, I’m really, really late for the podcast world guys. You had been doing it for a long time. So I’m not too convinced by the too late kind of argument. But as we’re starting now, I guess I’m not sure if it’s any different. It’s not so much capitalizing on being early with something. What do you hope to do that’s hopefully a little bit different than somebody else? And at least who do you hope to help with it? What is the message and what kind of clarity can you offer?

John (14:23): You’re write about gamers earning digital currency, the whole virtual reality world. If I’m looking for ideas that are going to be the next whatever, big thing, where do you recommend people go or how do they get exposure to some creative ideas like that?

Chris (14:41): Yeah, so they start with their own skills. Start with your own skills, your own set of knowledge. Make a list of not just things that you’re excited about or passionate about, but things that you’re good at, things that you have knowledge in. Try to look for some things that are a little bit lesser known. Don’t just think about your formal education, your traditional career path. Think about whatever else it could be. And so for video games, there’s a whole chapter in the book about blockchain video games. I kind of got immersed into this world and spent a lot of time like buying different gaming assets. There’s this whole world now where there are video games that are also financial marketplaces. So it’s a game in the sense that you’re competing against other players, but you’re also investing real money. And so once you have your skills and your talents, then it’s like, what is out there? What is out there that I could find? Reddit is a great source of that. Look at Reddit, look at other networks.

John (15:31): One of the categories you write about in this book that I found kind of fascinating is something you call prediction markets.

Chris (15:37): Talk

John (15:38): About that one. But then also maybe how would, again, I can’t call ’em traditional businesses, I’m not sure what else

Chris (15:44): You

John (15:44): Call, but how would businesses take a little bit of a cue from the folks that are playing in that market?

Chris (15:50): So I experimented a lot for this book. Each chapter of the book is kind of an experiment and what happened, how much money was involved and what the outcome was and such. I won some, I lost some. And one of the things I did was this world of prediction market where people can bet on anything. So everybody knows about the stock market. They know you can bet on sports, but you can also bet on Drake’s next album on how many streams it’s going to get. I bet on the T Ss a checkpoint line, how many people are going to go through security tomorrow or whatever day? I bet on Brittany Spear’s conservatorship case, I made $200 off that. So all kinds of things. If you want to get into it, there’s a lot of platforms. One is called Predict It, predict it.org. Another one’s called Calci, K A L S H I K A L, SS H I, poly Market. There’s a few different ones you can kind of go and experiment. As for traditional businesses, I don’t know. I think this is just something to be aware of that in the future, the very near future, anyone anywhere will be able to bet on anything. And that is different than it’s ever been before. There’s always been a lot of regulation about that. And so that could affect all sorts of different events

John (16:53): Growing up in the age when Pete Rose got thrown out of baseball for betting on James now, and that’s Bangs is now the number one sponsor of every sport. Isn’t that crazy?

Chris (17:02): That’s right. That’s right.

John (17:04): So I know you have a ton of stories in here, and this is always an unfair question, but do you have a favorite that you illustrate in the book?

Chris (17:11): Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Favorite cloud story? Well, I always like these wild and wacky ones. There’s a story of a British teenager who made $400,000 naming Chinese babies. She was giving English names to Chinese parents, and her goal was to pay for university. Obviously she covered that in a little bit more. So there’s a lot of stories that are kind of like one-offs, but I guess there’s also a chapter about online education of just maybe more normal people who are just like, they had an idea, they kind of got good at something. But there’s a woman named Whitney who taught outdoor education survival skills, and she got famous from being on a reality TV show, but then she got a little bit of famous, but then she really built a sustainable business around teaching women and others, but particularly women, these outdoor survival skills. And so I thought that was really interesting.

John (18:03): Well, Chris, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can connect with you if they like, or obviously find a copy of Gonzo Capitalism.

Chris (18:12): Yeah, John, thank you so much. It’s been too long and I’m really glad to come back. So it’s Chris Gibo, chris gibo.com, 1 93 countries on Instagram, or the podcast is called Side Hustle School.

John (18:23): Yeah, and don’t worry about spelling Gibo. We will.

Chris (18:26): Thank you. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

John (18:28): Awesome. Well, again, it was great catching up with you, and hopefully we’ll run it to you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Chris (18:33): Okay. I look forward to it. Thanks, man. I appreciate you.

John Jantsch (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christie Horseman. It’s over 10 years experience in the B two B and B two C SaaS based. She is the director, mother and teacher based in Vancouver, British Columbia currently serves as the VP of marketing at Thinkific, a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. And she also writes about marketing for Entrepreneur Magazine. So Christie, welcome to the show.

Christie Horsman (00:40): Thank you so much, John. I’ve been a listener for many years, so it’s very exciting for me to be here.

John Jantsch (00:46): Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you listening for many years. Many I

Christie Horsman (00:51): Know.

John Jantsch (00:52): So you recently wrote an article and it appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine, four Ways to Create Four Ways Creators Are Revolutionizing Marketing and How Big Brands Can Benefit. So let’s start there a little bit because we are really going to talk about change in marketing, change in B two B marketing. I want to bring in the whole creator topic. So it seemed like that just kind of teed it up for us. So talk a little bit about the primary point you were trying to get across in that article.

Christie Horsman (01:20): Yeah, I think that just coming from my career in B two B marketing and the way the B two B marketing has evolved over time, and one of the biggest, I think impacts to B two B marketing and how people are approaching it today has been through the creator economy and just the change in marketing because you have so many people that are able to open their phone and talk to their audience, talk to people, talk about their point of view, talk about their passion, their unique genius, and how companies are scrambling to get into that mindset of what the creator brings to their marketing tactics and their business and what that means for businesses that have typically been a little stiffer in their marketing.

John Jantsch (02:08): So let’s define a term there. You used the term creator economy, and I’m guessing it’s a pretty buzzy term, but I’m also guessing there’s a lot of confusion about what that means or misconceptions even frankly about what that means. So how do you define that or how do you define that as being maybe different than traditional economic models?

Christie Horsman (02:28): Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of, I’ve read, heard being in part of the creator economy ourselves at think of it, and there’s a lot of definitions out there of what it is and the way that we define it and the way that I kind of look at it is anybody who is out there really using their unique genius, their unique point of view to influence, to attract, to create either a community, a group of people, an audience or sell something through that community or audience. So it’s really just, I think a lot of people would say are creators, are you see these YouTube creators? Are they entertainers or are they educators? And actually think of it, we look at these two categories and define them as such. There are people that are out there that are just creating for the sake of entertainment purposes, which is amazing. And then there’s people out there that are creating for education, and that’s how we kind of look at the lens of the creator economy. I think last time I read, and I think it was in a Forbes article a couple of weeks ago, there was this estimate of what are the creator economy worth? And it’s somewhere between a hundred billion to 700 billion, which is depending on how you define those people that are within it, but it’s growing every day, obviously with the advent of social media.

John Jantsch (03:44): So I think for a lot of people, they see some of the folks that are really doing what seem kind of goofy things that are getting them a lot of attention and maybe making them a lot of money. And I’m sure that big brands B brands particularly are looking at that and going, well, that’s not for us necessarily. So what is the lesson that might come to play that would be practical, usable, relevant for that B two B brand particularly?

Christie Horsman (04:09): Yeah, and I think exactly when you look at, I always look at Mr. Beast for instance, and brands aren’t going to go out there and start trying to jump 1300 motorcycles in a row or something like that, and so do something crazy. But what the dilution, if you bring it down to it that even creator entertainers and educators have in common is it’s this human element. It’s this trusted element and it’s something that brands like big brands really have always been striving for, right? To be that trusted brand, to have that element of yes, come to us for the product or service that you want or need. And it really boils down to that human and that trustworthy element. They’re putting themselves out there so much. We know so much about these creators and they’ve created this humanity as part of towards their audience, as part of their brand that big brands really need to look at and say, how do I emulate this? How do I bring this into our messaging and our core values?

John Jantsch (05:11): So it seems to me there would be a couple logical paths if somebody’s saying, yeah, that’s kind of a missing piece of ours. Obviously they could go create their own connection of some form to their, they’re not fans yet. I guess it would be their customers even or their community. But also a lot of brands are exploring, let’s get one of those influencers, if you will, or somebody that’s a creator that has a big audience, let’s get them associated with our brand. Is there a better way? Are there pitfalls to one way or the other?

Christie Horsman (05:43): Yeah, I think the only pitfalls I see when looking for, I think hiring creator influencers to represent your brand is great. I think that it’s a great way to bridge and find a new audience. If you understand your core customer, where your core customer is digesting content and who they’re looking up to and the creator sphere, it’s a great way to bridge that and gain that new audience. I think where sometimes it falls flat. And this is where again, that kind of trusted component is a lot of the times creators, we always say, they say it’s an ad, they say it’s sponsored and everyone knows that it’s a sponsored deal. And that’s how creators, realistically, a lot of creators make the majority of their money is through these big brand sponsorships. And lately we’ve seen some of that fall off as brands have pulled back a little bit because they’re seeing that, yeah, it’s great for eyeballs, but maybe it’s not always driving the sales they want to see. And so I think that it’s definitely important to align yourself with creators that align with your values and that make sense for your brand. But I would also say that for brands to take the tactics that creators are using and try to employ them themselves to create more of an authentic humanized element for their brand without having to go through that creator or that third party. Right.

John Jantsch (07:05): One of the hallmarks I suppose of a popular influencer or creator is it’s basically personal branding. I mean, they’ve gone out there and established themselves as a voice that does this, or as a person that does this or a person who shares amazing information or how to stuff on a certain topic, how does a brand really adopt that mentality? Because I think that’s real tricky for ’em, isn’t it?

Christie Horsman (07:33): And I think that’s where people have gotten stuck a lot of the time. They think that, and especially I think when we think of B2B traditionally has been very broad strokes in terms of our marketing. We’re trying to capture a broad audience. We’re also trying to be a little bit elusive because we really actually just want you to talk to our sales team who’s going to get you more details. And I think that we need to go away from that and what the creator brings and what brands can start to emulate in terms of tactics are when we think about creating that human element and connection, it’s really about, I’ve seen companies use their employees in a lot of their advertising, for instance, and not just for hiring for actual campaigns. We did this actually last year with our Meet the CSS campaign and we wanted to humanize our customer service team, and we used actual customer service reps in the campaign.

(08:27): And I’ve seen other brands do this where they’re like, look, we’re not good at commercials and we’re not good about talking about this, but what we are good at is actually being customer service reps and here’s why. But it humanizes the brand because you’re bringing in that element of people. And that’s the thing that the creator does is they bring themselves the creator’s life story, their family, sometimes their kids, their dog. And the more that you can do that as a company with your employees to bring them to the forefront really humanizes the brand because it is a company, but it’s also a company that’s made up of actual people with actual lives.

John Jantsch (09:02): That’s one

Christie Horsman (09:02): Way that I see.

John Jantsch (09:04): We’ve certainly for the last few years, particularly as hiring has become more challenging for a lot of companies, we’ve really put their employee or employer branding on the forefront of marketing just because it’s a great marketing message too. I mean, the fact that you have employees that love where they work probably is a good marketing message as well. Not to mention that they obviously are on the front lines of really interacting with customers anyway. So I think a lot of people, I’m thinking makeup for example. A lot of makeup is sold directly to consumers through the creator economy. It’s probably one of the bigger categories. So that model has that model. As B2B folks try, I mean that’s typically a B2C play. They’re not trying to sell to stores. So as that model really something that is influencing or maybe even blurring the lines, there used to be the, oh, I sell only b2b. I mean a lot of marketers are like, I’m a B2B marketer, or I’m a B2C marketer. And sort of blurring the lines now because a lot of the same ideas are being employed, authenticity, personal branding, those things.

Christie Horsman (10:11): And I think the makeup one’s such a good example because it really did open the doors for people to say, this is how I apply this, this is how I do this, this is how I use this. And you can actually see a foundation go on in a video using real people. And I think the interesting thing that how I’ve seen it kind of manifest in B two B has been in the veil being lifted on the product or service that you’re selling. So for instance, I think I’ve seen a couple companies, ourselves included, we’ve played with this a little bit and I think that we have to get better at it. Everyone does, but it’s offering real people those customer stories of how they’re using the product, what does the product look like on the inside, showing more of the product upfront and having real customers talk about it in an unfiltered way.

(11:01): We’ve done this in terms of LinkedIn lives where we just have customers come on and talk about their journey and their company or their personal brand and then how they use the product. And we actually show the product being used. And I think that it’s bridging. We have to figure out how to open that door a little bit more. But it is, I think that’s the transition where we’re saying, look, we not having this, you’re not going to see the product until you’ve had three or four sales calls. We’ll finally show you the product. It’s like, no, we’re going to show you the product up upfront. It’s in our marketing, it’s right here. And it’s being used by real people.

John Jantsch (11:36): It is probably an antiquated terminology, but I think it still means something. But a lot of B two B brands used to spend some money sampling, for example, spend some money on getting directly to the consumer, even though that consumer was only going to go to the store now and ask for the product. So we used to call that pulling sales as opposed to pushing sales. So does the idea of this creator economy that way apply, in other words, get exposure for your product even though you’re then going to tell them go to Macy’s and get it, or whatever, wherever it’s sold?

Christie Horsman (12:08): Yeah, I think that it’s one of the, it’s for me, I think that’s one of the best things about the creator economy is that they’re bringing that audience in. They’re pulling people in and bringing that audience in, that’s the right fit audience. So again, finding the right creator to pair with based on your brand, your objectives, your product service. But from a B two B perspective, it’s even, I think more important because a lot of these companies have such a core ideal customer profile that if you know it, you can go out there and really pull people in with interesting content through these creators because they’re talking about it. And I think about, for us, we talk a lot to people in customer education and these roles and people that run these communities where customer educators are living and talking about their day-to-day problems of how do I make this content? How do I create these programming? And so we’re going out there and trying to pull those people back in into the conversation through those creator communities that they’re building with these really engaged audiences.

John Jantsch (13:13): Alright, let’s talk about R O I or metrics in general. I think because initially sort of a creator economy plays have kind of focused on engagement and building community and things that sometimes are hard to measure. I think that those have obviously, I think people are putting metrics to those, but what do you say to a B2B person that’s just like, how’s that going to move the needle?

Christie Horsman (13:37): Yeah, so I think even I have struggled in the past with, we love working with some of these creators, but to your point, the measurement of the metric that we’re trying to move is brand awareness, which we all know is you can try and try to put some numbers to it, but eventually that there’s something there that you can’t quite measure. So what we like to do is when we’re working with creators or we’re thinking about working with these communities, for instance, we love to think about depending on what it is, but for instance, we held a community kind of roundup event where it was like a mingle event and then it was a bit of a, let’s talk about round table kind of topics and the R O I on events like that. For me, obviously there’s an element of just getting the brand out there and having those conversations, but it’s also about how many people are coming in and actually wanting to have a conversation.

(14:33): So thinking about how many conversations the sales team was able to capture, how many net new names do we get on to our list? And then going all the way down is obviously how are we making that into a sale and tracing that back into these events that we hold. A lot of it’s around influence pipe that influence pipe number for b2b. And then a lot of it for some of our creators is we have a really excellent affiliate program, so we entice them to bring people in and sign them up with the product on our self-serve side. And we have really great payouts on that affiliate side. So that’s kind of the two sides of it. There’s definitely, again, that middle layer of brand awareness. How do we measure that? And obviously we look at things like media and share of voice, but we try to think about that influence pipe on the B2B side and then thinking about that we have those hard numbers on the affiliate side of how we’re driving signups.

John Jantsch (15:25): So think if it naturally was created as a tool for the creator economy. I mean a lot of influencers, a lot of creators needed beyond YouTube, they needed a paywall and they needed ability to have courses and to expand access to them in a paid way. What are you seeing? So I think that it’s well established. That’s a great tool for that. So what are you telling or what would you tell B two B brands now who are like, well, we don’t courses. Does that make sense for us? What would you tell them in terms of their creation?

Christie Horsman (16:03): And to start on how Thinkific was our founder, we actually have a really great founder story, a creator himself. He has a course that’s still today, you can take it, it’s an LSAT prep course. That’s how it started. And he wanted to be able to educate the massive sounds

John Jantsch (16:15): Awful.

Christie Horsman (16:16): Yeah, I know. But that was how we started. And so we really have been through the pandemic, we went through this boom and then we started thinking companies really could benefit from having courses to expand their reach to their customers. And I always think about this when we talk to companies on sales calls even and say, look, do you want to have customers or do you want to have fans? Do you want to have people who are extremely loyal and engaged with your brand? And the way you can do that is through customer education programs, you’re educating your customers to better use your product. You’re creating exclusive communities sometimes in this case. So you’re creating these fans that are incredibly loyal to your company and your brand and that eventually are going to a create more word of mouth and better referrals for your company. But also you’re creating a very loyal group of customers that are fully educated in your product, which is some B2B SaaS. One of the trickiest things is getting people to make sure that they’re using your product when your customers buy it. So

John Jantsch (17:22): More features they use a less churn. Right,

Christie Horsman (17:24): Exactly. And I think in today’s economy too, we see that acquiring customers right now is tough. And so you want to keep the customers you have. And one of the best ways to do that is through customer education programs. We’ve got really good example is Hootsuite, which is a social media management software, and they have Hootsuite Academy and they have built Hootsuite Academy from just a few courses on social media certification to this is a standalone revenue set for them outside of their core. So they’ve got a secondary line of revenue and they’re driving customer loyalty, customer education within the product, but the actual users, end users of their product. But they’re also, they’ve created this certification where it’s like, Hey, I’m Hootsuite certified. I am ready to be your social media manager. So it’s this twofold. And I think for me, when I see companies like that be so successful, and we have a lot of really great customer stories around that, I’m like, why aren’t all companies doing this? Take this education piece that’s happening and bring it into your B2B customers. It just makes sense. And you see that success.

John Jantsch (18:33): Yeah, I think you make a great point. I’ve been using for years when I talk about the customer journey, for many people it stops at buy, but certainly content stops at buy quite often. And I think you’re right. I mean even if it’s just orientation and onboarding and then obviously through what you said, repeat business and referral business, those are great reasons to create content. And obviously that’s a whole category of content that most businesses aren’t even thinking about. You also mentioned a couple times, and I think that B2B brands are really waking up to this idea of community. I think a lot of brands are waking up to this idea of community because for the reason you said it’s sometimes tougher to get eyeballs or keep customers and community is one of the greatest ways to do it. How would you use a platform like Thinkific really as a community model? I mean, there’s a lot of community tools coming up. Circle is one, for example. How is Thinkific addressing, because I believe you were created as a pure content creation and not necessarily as a community tool. How are you addressing that engagement amongst members?

Christie Horsman (19:40): So because we saw when we were, to your point, coming up through content engagement, online education, really that learning management software tool, we saw early on that community was such a hand in hand thing with these groups of people that were wanting to learn together to take courses together. And even if in an on-demand setting, you’re by yourself, community was a way for people could talk about it and learn more and discuss. So we launched our own community product last year and it’s been such a great add-on for both our creator educators, which we call our B two C side, as well as some of our B two B customers, which we call ’em think fake plus because it does bind those people together and it gives you a place where you as a company or you as a creator can kind of moderate the conversation and create more engagement post courses.

(20:35): Because a lot of the time you’re taking an on-demand course, you’re sitting your home by yourself, you don’t get that engagement. The community is a way to bridge that engagement aspect. And it’s been really exciting to see. I actually love our think of a community. I’m in it almost daily talking to our creators because it’s just such an interesting place to be. And one thing for us being obviously B2B and B2C SaaS, we launch a lot of products in there. First we’ll put stuff in there and then we make that exclusive feeling for our community, but also we’re getting such amazing intel back from them as the end users of the product.

John Jantsch (21:12): Yeah, I’m sure more and businesses will wake up to this, but I’ve certainly seen it firsthand. We certify agencies in our methodology and they go through and they love it. They get a lot of great training, but we have agencies that have been with us 10 years and they’ll tell you point blank, I stay for the community. I don’t need John and his team anymore. I stay because I’ve made friends here. And I think that’s a huge element for business, isn’t

Christie Horsman (21:35): It? It’s that peer to peer communication that they get that’s hosted by, if you’re smart, it’s hosted by you. The other thing is, I think a lot of companies don’t realize is there are communities out there about their product or service, and if they’re not in the conversation, it’s happening without them.

John Jantsch (21:52): Yeah, absolutely. That’s great point for good or bad. Right. So Chris, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the show. You want to tell people where they can connect with you and find out more, a little more about what we talked about today?

Christie Horsman (22:03): Yeah, so I’m obviously on LinkedIn. It’s Christie Horseman, VP of Marketing at Thinkific. If you’re looking for Christie Horseman’s and you can always come over to thinkific.com, you can check out the products and service there. And also we’ve got links on there to our social and our communities, which all of my team run. So I’m always hopping in our community if you need to, you want to join there as well.

John Jantsch (22:24): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road in beautiful Vancouver.

Christie Horsman (22:32): Thank you so much, John. Appreciate the opportunity.