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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Volman (19:22): Exactly. .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (01:35): .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Barlos (02:07): ,

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

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

John Jantsch (03:21): Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (11:43): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean, pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot’s CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like content assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual task and more time for what matters. Your customers HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(12:47): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (01:29): There are

Russell Henneberry (01:29): Several people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (13:07): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean, pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one, and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like content assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual tasks and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, that’s right, plural are Garrett Brown and Colin Coggins. They are the bestselling co-authors of The Unsold Mindset: redefining what it means to sell. They’re both longtime sales leaders, practitioners and professors of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. Apparently, you two met at an enterprise startup software called Bium, which helped lead an acquisition to, by Google, I should say, and they’re both investors, startup advisors, and co-founders of Agency 18, A firm that helps mission-driven companies adopt the unsold mindset. So Colin and Garrett, welcome to the show.

Garrett Brown (01:39): Thanks, John. You got it all there,

John Janstch (01:41): . Yeah, I did. I probably only one of you is a professor of entrepreneurship, but you know, now you both,

Garrett Brown (01:46): Well, we are both. We do everything together. So we, we preach together. We’ve got our final tonight actually, and we will be up there in front of those students side by side, just as we are here in this conversation.

John Janstch (01:56): Awesome, awesome. So I’ll get the easy question outta the way. And it typically, a title has, uh, for most books, has something that needs to be defined . So let’s start with what is, in your words, the unsold mindset?

Colin Coggins (02:10): I can go first on this. Yeah. Our journey to write this book was a really interesting one because we thought that we were interviewing sort of the greatest salespeople on the planet, and we wanted to know why they were so good. And what we soon found out, which is something that mirrored what we had seen, you know, in our careers up to this point, is that the greatest salespeople were the exact opposite of who people thought they were, and they didn’t always have sales in their title. And so as we were interviewing and as we were cross-referencing what we were hearing with people and what we were seeing, you know, in this space as practitioners, they all had something really obvious and common, which was that they were unsold on who society expected them to be in their roles. They were unsold on who customers wanted them to be.

(02:54): They were unsold on how they were supposed to act. This idea that they could be great at selling without becoming someone they weren’t was something that was very near and dear to their heart. And then meanwhile, you know, Garrett and I have been teaching and, and working in, you know, for decades, and what we were finding was that people thought that in order to be a great salesperson, you needed to act like a great salesperson. And what we found out was that great salespeople are actually unsold on what the definition of a great salesperson is.

John Janstch (03:24): So in a lot of ways, you’re actually juxtaposing this idea with what everybody thinks of selling. You know, I mean, obviously unsold is the opposite of sold . And so everybody talks about, I, you know, I’m terrible at sales. I hate selling, I hate to be sold. I mean, those are all kind of drawn from that stereotype, aren’t they?

Garrett Brown (03:43): That’s exactly, and Collin said, we started out writing what we thought was a book about the mindset about great salespeople, but as we started interviewing them, and we would ask them, you know, who’s, who’s the greatest salesperson? You know, we want to talk to them immediately. They were giving us names of people that were not salespeople. It was marketers and CEOs and actors and military generals and artists and everything in between. So we’ve got a wide scope of people represented in this mindset that are not salespeople in, in fact, most of them aren’t, because we’re all selling every day. Right? Yeah.

John Janstch (04:13): I mean, I tell, you know, I talk to a lot of people getting ready to start businesses, and I advise them, and I, you know, I’ve kind of gone to saying, look, I hate to tell you this, but 50% of your job is selling . So I don’t know what you’re doing, what you’re starting, what it is, who you’re gonna, you know, just deal with that because that’s what it, that’s what the job really, isn’t it?

Colin Coggins (04:29): Well, that’s what the interesting part is, that you had to make the caveat, like, I hate to tell you. Right, right, right, right, right. Deal with that. Right. And so, Garrett and I, so we fell in love with this profession once we realized what it could be versus what we thought it was and how much it’s given to us. Yeah. And so this understanding that everybody is selling themselves or an idea or someone else’s idea, and we teach the only sales mindset class for entrepreneurs in all of higher education that we know of. But the reason that people are showing up every Monday to this class isn’t because they want to be, quote unquote salespeople. Like they don’t realize it yet, but a third of them wanna sell ideas like they’re the future CEOs and entrepreneurs and marketers, you, a third of them, want to sell themselves.

(05:13): They want to build relationships. They also want to be leaders. They also want to be entrepreneurs, but they also want to be able to have people, like, have agency in their decisions. And, and people feel like they’re in control of that decision to want to go and fight for their leader, right? Like, these are, like, people talk about sales, and then you got the third, they’re the crazy ones like us, where we actually sell products and services. , I’m kidding. Obviously, this idea that we all sell in some capacity isn’t new. The idea that we all sell, and it’s not a yucky word, and that you can’t change the world, you can’t change your world. You can’t do anything like a immense proportion and meaning if you don’t know how to move people, that’s not yucky, you know?

John Janstch (05:55): Yeah. So, so what, you know, if everybody had this myth of what I’m supposed to be, or how I have to change myself when I’m selling, you know, what’s the superpower that you actually need to have?

Garrett Brown (06:06): Hmm. There’s, well, good news is there’s an entire book about that , but no, I, the main thing that all these people have in common is that they just, they don’t buy into the box that they’re supposed to fit into. And we all have a box that we think we’re supposed to fit into, whether it’s when we’re selling or you know, our work box, this is who we are at work, this is who we are as a parent. And all of these people were incredible at stepping outside of that box and doing things their own way, whether it was the traditional salesperson who, you know, bucked the system and said, you know what? I don’t have to ask the questions that are in this script, or I don’t have to sound like a typical salesperson. Sounds, I can sound like the person that I am at the bar on Friday night with my friends with my customers, and they’ll still love me. Or, you know, call ’em, you talk about intentional ignorance, which is, uh, a chapter in our book about all of these great sellers, and we’ll call ’em sellers no matter what you do, they would intentionally ignore parts of their job that they didn’t think serve them, that they didn’t think that they were either strong at, that they weren’t passionate about, because they knew that they would come across differently to their customers or to the people that they were trying to inspire or influence, be by pretending that they were excited about these things.

Colin Coggins (07:12): Yeah. It, it’s a hyper authenticity conversation, but there’s, there’s common threads that sort of tie the whole book together. Like, it’s easier to tell somebody, you know, be authentic whenever Garrett and I tell a student to be authentic, they, okay, I’m gonna act authentic. It’s like this funny joke, like, no, you don’t get it. Like, we’re not asking you to act authentic. But what we found was that these great salespeople, like are really good at one thing, like better than most people have ever even thought to be good at it, which is like putting their imperfections on display as early as possible for no other reason than to make sure that the people understand they’re a human being. Now, the byproduct of that is very simple, people like themselves. So as soon as someone can see themselves in you, right, that is when you catch a vibe, that’s when you start looking for the good in people. That’s when you start believing in them. Most of us are trying to be a really great version of ourselves when we get in these selling situations. But the greatest salespeople on the planet, they come in pretty raw, pretty, pretty vulnerable, pretty authentic, just to make sure that you see yourself in them immediately.

John Janstch (08:24): I imagine when you explain that to people really almost as a technique, , if you will, it’s sort of counterintuitive, isn’t it? I’m, it’s like, oh, no, I, I’m, I’m supposed to have the answers. Um, , you know, how can I let my flaws show? Like I, I, I’m sure once you do it a time or two, and it works because people connect, uh, at a much deeper level, it probably gets easier. But initially, isn’t that a little tough for people? And I know that’s the whole basis of what you’re trying to sell here, , if you will. Yeah.

Garrett Brown (08:52): But you’re, you’re not wrong. We were just in office hours with a student who, he’s, he started his own business, he’s starting to have conversations with potential customers and potential employees, and he’s really nervous. He’s like, I, you know, I don’t wanna just be myself. I feel like they’re gonna think I’m just a student. And so, kind of tying back to what Colin just said, one, one of the things we, a piece of advice that we always give no matter what your job is when you’re in a selling situation, is to show your work. So you remember, like in school, in math class, you wouldn’t just get credit for the answer. You had to show how you got to the answer chat,

John Janstch (09:25): G, that’s how I got there, right?

Garrett Brown (09:28): What’s that

John Janstch (09:28): Chat, G p t? That’s how I got the answer, right?

Garrett Brown (09:31): The answer sometimes, but you know, by when, when you let people into your world and you show your work, and I, and we told this student, we said, you know, tell these people that, tell them that you’re a little bit nervous and you don’t wanna come across a certain way and let them into that, then suddenly they’re looking for the good in you just as much as you are looking for the good in them. Real game changer when it comes to that stuff. So, so you’re right to some people, they’re like, I can’t be authentic while I’m selling. I have to be selling, I have to do this, I have to do that. But that’s exactly what these people taught us, and exactly what the book is about, which is you don’t, people don’t want a sales robots why the stereotype exists. They want a human being who they’re gonna enjoy spending time with and doing business with in the long run.

Colin Coggins (10:10): And then put that in like clearer terms, like as clear as I can make ’em, people will say no to you because you’re right. Hmm. Like, you know, you wanna see like the greatest salesperson in any room, look for the smartest person in the room that’s actively trying to figure out how not to be the smartest person in the room. You know, this different, it’s a, it’s cliche. It’s like it’s a learner versus a knower. And it sounds very obvious, but great salespeople are really good at asking questions that they actually wanna know the answers to, as opposed to what most people do, which are either asking the leading questions or asking questions to lead them to a goal. You start asking questions that people, you know, that you actually want all the answers to, you’ll eventually ask a question, no one’s ever heard before.

(10:50): Now you’re giving people gifts, right? They’re like ideating for the first time in real time. Like, damn, I never thought about that before. You know what, whatever that answer is, they will take ownership in that answer, right? Like, that’s their answer. That’s that agency that we’re talking about, that they feel like they’re part of the decision making process. Someone tells you every objection that you had, they handle every reason that you don’t want to buy is, is irrelevant. And now you’re backed up in a corner and all of the reasoning is accurate, but you got this gut feeling, you’re like, all right, I’m just gonna say no, but I don’t know why. The reason is because I do not feel like I’m part of this decision. You didn’t need me to be here to make the decision, and therefore I’m gonna say no, even though I can’t articulate why. That’s why it’s a lack of agency.

John Janstch (11:31): Yeah. I actually had this exact question down, ask questions people haven’t heard before. And you touched on that. And, and I will say in my own experience, you know, we sell marketing strategy, uh, nobody wants marketing strategy or, you know, they all need it, but , nobody wakes up and says, I’m gonna go buy it. And so y you know, by being the person that asked them, it is like, why hasn’t any other marketing person asked me that before you, I’ve seen it countless times. People, you know, they’re, the mind just starts spinning. It’s like, yeah, it’s almost the opposite of what you said, Colin. They’re like, I need to buy from this guy because , I’m not really even sure why yet , but, you know, but because, you know, he’s ma actually making me think of my business in different ways, you know, it’s really turning something off.

Garrett Brown (12:15): Yeah. You’re getting to something that we could talk for hours and hours on , which is asking questions and Yeah. You know, we call those questions that you’re talking about, we call ’em impactful questions, right? Because so many of the questions that people ask in a business setting or in a selling setting are designed to extract value. You know, tell me what your budget is, give me your sales process, whatever it is you’re taking. But these great question, askers, they’re adding value with the questions that they ask. And, you know, to Collin’s point about agency, it’s suddenly things are becoming their idea because they’re thinking about something for the first time in real time and making decisions on, oh, I, I wanna learn more about that, or I wanna do this, or I wanna do that. Um, and then the important thing, the real difference maker though, is that these people are asking these questions because they genuinely wanna know the answers to them. Yeah. They’re, they’re not asking them as a tactic. They’re not going, Ooh, I’ve got a good question. That’s gonna get somebody to do something. They genuinely wanna know the answer. And by caring differently, they’re coming across differently. They’re, the follow up question is the question that suddenly becomes magic, because now they’re listening to the answer. They care about what’s been said. They ask a question that followed up that, that the person’s never been asked before. And that’s what’s really special about these people with this unsold mindset.

John Janstch (13:23): Well, and what I find is that when you do land on that, you, you’re actually providing value right then, because you asked that question . And I think that’s, you know, you know, people talk about consultative selling, that’s kind of a term that gets bantered around. And I think it’s really, uh, for a lot of people it’s, it’s no more than saying, I have, I’ve seen this before. I have the answer for you. And I think what you’re, you know, you’re really talking, it’s almost like coaching, selling, you know, you’re coaching through some problems, you know, that people hadn’t thought about. But, but I do want to hit on the point that you said it actually really is because you care. It’s not like I’ve got a trick up my sleeve.

Colin Coggins (14:01): I wanna, well, I, yeah, I mean that the caring thing is honestly the wrinkle in it all. Yeah. Is that we all know what it feels like to talk to somebody that’s looking for the good in us. Yeah. You know what that feels like. Yeah. So the, I mean, the baseline of this conversation is that you move differently when you are enamored with the person that you’re talking to. And as we move through life, especially in our careers, we forget that. And either we’re accidentally falling in love with someone because they’re so perfect for what we care about, that we can’t help but be enamored. But then there are these great salespeople that will intentionally start to look for the possibility of who these people could be. Mm-hmm. , you know, like there’s an old, old sales method where you do the three by three.

(14:46): You know, you look at three things that you could leverage in a conversation. Like, Hey, I read that you acquired so-and-so and you know, we can help with that. You know, Garrett and I, we like to make people really uncomfortable. So we’ll tell people, go ahead and find three things that you could love about this person. You’ve never spoke to them before, but like hypothetically, go out there and research them. And if it were true, what are the three things that you could love about them? And what ends up happening is you see these people within three minutes, they have these like questions that they need answers because they’re not sure if the person that they’re gonna meet is actually who they hope they are or not. So you’ll get on a call and you’ll see it. Like, they’ll ask the same question that everyone asks.

(15:26): And then the second question is a question that a lot of people have never heard before. Like, we did a whole, I’ll, I’ll cut to the, the short version of this. We did a consultant, uh, a consulting agreement a while ago with, with a group. And there was a gentleman that was doing really well on the sales force, and then everyone else was not. And we asked them to fall in love with a prospect, right? Like a lead. And he was like, I’m not doing it. I don’t need it. Right? Like, look at my numbers, I’m fine. We’re like, yeah, just do it for everyone else. And he’s like, no, we’re like, why? And he is like, cuz this is an unqualified lead. We’re like, you know what, you don’t have to take the lead, just do the three by three following a love exercise, you know, and then we’ll give it to a newbie.

(16:06): And so he’s doing this exercise, you know, begrudgingly. And then all of a sudden, like, he looks up and he goes, huh. And we all watch him. We’re like, what? And he’s like, researching this lead. And he goes, the guy graduated around the same time I did. And so we’re like, oh, you must love that. You love that he’s the same age as you. And he’s like, no. I’m like, okay. Keeps going. You hear the second, huh? And we’re like, what is it? He’s like, this guy went to the University of Minnesota. I’m like, you love the university of me? No. Okay. And then, you know, one more second looks back up and he goes, but Bob Dylan went to the University of Minnesota . And yes, I love Bob Dylan also happens to be around my age. And you watch this like his eyes, like they turn into something else where when it’s time, three minutes shut, let’s take this lead now give it to a newbie.

(16:54): See what happens. Cuz you proved our point. Great. Right? We’re good now. Not a chance. He’s not letting somebody else take that lead. He has an, he has questions he needs to know the answers to. This guy shows up on this call and you’ve never seen two people catch a vibe so quickly, . Not because they were the same age, not because they both liked Dylan, but because this guy was asking questions that no one else cared to ask. Yeah. And so, you know, that’s a, that’s a skill to care about someone in a way that most people don’t. That’s a talent.

Garrett Brown (17:24): It is. And for people listening, like think we all know how it feels to be in a conversation with somebody who genuinely cares about us. And we all know how we sound different when we genuinely care about the person. Like, think about that conversation that Colin just talked about, conversation. Somebody who might have seen Bob Dylan while he was in his college years versus up. I’m just gonna call the 28th name on this list of 50 people that I have to talk to that day. You are going to sound very, if you have done the work that Colin just talked about

John Janstch (17:52): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I many pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any CRM. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like content assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual tasks and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(18:57): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. You know, a hundred percent agree. In the back of my mind, I’m saying some people just don’t have that gift that that talent, that empathy, that whatever you want to call it, I mean, they don’t care. I mean, is that person, is that something somebody can learn or is that something that like, that ship sails at some point?

Colin Coggins (20:01): Everybody cares about something . Now they, they could be horrible human beings and care about the wrong stuff, you know, and then who am I to say what’s wrong? Right? But , but that, I think that’s the point. You know, every, who people expect you to be and who people hope you aren’t always the same person. Yeah. And so it’s like, yeah, like maybe you suck. You know, like maybe like you’re, maybe you are not nice and you’re not kind and, and you don’t care about things that are important, but whatever you do care about, like whatever’s most important to you, you’ll ask a question that someone’s never heard before. Now the answer to that question might be something that they still take ownership in and ideate for the first time and take agency in. But it might not help your point. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, like if you start asking questions that you really wanna know the answers to, people will surprise you. Yeah.

John Janstch (20:55): If, if nothing else, the connection will be made. Right?

Colin Coggins (20:57): I mean, look, here’s an example. During the height of lockdown, during covid, like we saw a group of underperformers do really well and historically they didn’t. And when we think, when we went back and watched the tape and figured out why they weren’t doing well, it was be, I mean, why they were doing well, it was because the beginning of their conversations all sounded the same and they were across multiple different verticals. Okay? So these were not all the same people and all the same roles, but they were all doing well because the beginning of the conversation was, Hey, I just wanna pause really quick and just acknowledge the elephant in the room or the two year old in the room . And that’s my wife, right? With a mask chasing him. That’s the laundry station. That’s the homework station. We have no idea what we’re doing or if we should even be on this call right now.

(21:41): Just want to say it, you know? Yeah. And you would watch this like this reciprocation, like the person on the other end of the camera is like, thank God you said that. Like, this is so weird. This is my first pandemic too. And you would watch them catch this vibe in the first five minutes where they saw themselves in each other. Yeah. That’s just a microcosm of what the larger Right. The conversation we’re having is, which is great salespeople. No, just like these people knew, this person is not perfect either, right? Like during Covid they were like, you know what? I’m in an imperfect situation. I’m gonna give myself permission to talk about it cuz I know that they’re in the same imperfect situation. Yeah. Most of us are imperfect, most of us when we are being very authentic, are in a situation where we’re trying to figure it out and it’s not the ideal situation always. And most of us try to hide that part of us. Oh yeah. There’s some people that share that part of themselves

John Janstch (22:32): Pretty, pretty hard to have your act together with the unmade bed behind you in, in, uh, in this zone, right?

Colin Coggins (22:38): You get’s camera angle, you know what I mean? You dunno what bed’s behind there and you don’t even wanna know what’s behind this screen. You know, .

John Janstch (22:46): Alright. Right. So let’s go to hiring. I’m, let’s say I’m the CEO and I’m like, I listen to this. I’m thing. That’s what I want my salespeople doing. I mean, how do I spot that person? How do I, you know, look for somebody who maybe naturally has that gift, whether they have a sales resume or not.

Garrett Brown (23:02): Well, I think the good news is that it’s not necessarily a gift that some people have and some people don’t. It’s a matter of cultivating it and finding it. And so there, there’s a couple things that we always recommend. One as a leader is giving your people permission, right? To be the authentic version of themselves, to look for the things that they love in the customers and, and to do that sort of thing. And that means, you know, not necessarily rewarding behavior that doesn’t allow for those things. The other thing is setting up the infrastructure around your team to allow them to do that. So we talked about intentional ignorance before, you know mm-hmm. , we have talked to advertising technology salespeople who hate technology, right? Their, their job is to sell technology, but they hate it. They don’t want to talk about APIs and they don’t wanna talk about integrations.

(23:46): They just want to talk with their customers about how they can help them. And so instead of then trying to pretend, try to learn all the technology and pretend that they know it and pretend that they’re excited about it, they’ll bring in a resource from their company. They’ll bring in, you know, the technical salesperson or somebody from the product team who actually built it, or a, a former customer or a current customer who loves the product and also loves the technical elements of it. Whatever that is that infrastructure looks like for your business. You know, find ways to set that up around your people so that they don’t have to go out there and pretend to be something they’re not.

John Janstch (24:18): Yeah. I’m glad you made that point because, uh, like what you’re talking about, some of the things you’re talking about, the, there’s not a culture that exists, you know, that would actually allow that for some folks. So I, I mean, in the end, that’s what it really comes down to, isn’t it? It is. This is a culture thing. As much as it’s a technique.

Colin Coggins (24:34): I mean, you don’t wanna talk about culture. We could talk about, we should have started with culture. We could, we could for our, I mean like we, a key point in the book, in our learnings in our curriculum, and I think what we’ve seen in, in the real world is that what people are good at, you know, what people get paid to do and what people love doing are not always the same thing, right? And when you create a thriving sales forward culture where people don’t think that they’re gonna give up their mission by being a revenue centric company, like what you’re finding is that companies have done a good job of making sure that those two things converge. What you get paid to do and what you love doing are happening at the same time. Now you’re in the flow state right now, you’re in, you’ll pick up any book and they’ll call it different things.

(25:22): But now you’re where you want to be. That doesn’t happen overnight. And in, in order to do that, like first you gotta figure out what you would do for free. Like what do you love doing? Like the ad tech exec that Garrett was talking about, like she would build relationships for free, but what would, you know, what do you really need to get paid a lot of money to do? Like Ray Lewis, a football player, he’s got that great quote. He said, you know, do you pay me for what I do? What is it, Monday to Saturday? But Sundays are free like this idea, you know, you eventually you’ll start to look for what you love doing and what you get paid to do and you keep following that thread and eventually you create a culture where, not to sound too fufu, but everyone’s owning their own dharma, right? Like, if I love doing this, but I hate talking about tech, can you imagine if somebody that worked right next to me loved talking about tech, but hated building relationships and we both owned those different parts of the process, if everyone around you is doing what they love doing. Now B by the way, like I’m not talking about some dystopian future here. I’m just saying intentional ignorance works because it allows you to get closer to that place or what you love doing and what you get paid to do. Converge.

John Janstch (26:31): Love it. Speaking with Colin Coggins and Garrett Brown about their new book called The Unsold Mindset, redefining What it Means To Sell. I appreciate you guys stopping by here. You wanna invite people to connect with you, find the book, find your Work.

Garrett Brown (26:52): We are pretty easy to find online. We’re, where are we Colin? We’re on LinkedIn as ourselves. We’re on Twitter and Instagram at Colin and Garrett and we’ve got a little website, colinandgarrett.com that will basically give you way more than you ever wanted to know about the book and everything else.

Colin Coggins (27:10): Oh, and the newsletter we just dropped, we just gave away like a really, I think it’s still up there, like this really cool document that has a list of questions that you’re asking. You know, they say the most important conversations you’re having are the conversations you’re having with yourself. Yeah. So we compiled a really awesome list of questions that we’re getting great feedback on that are just shifting the way people sell immediately by looking at this doc before they engage in these conversations. So I think if you sign up for the newsletter, you get that or maybe just go to the site. That’s

Garrett Brown (27:38): Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Colin Coggins (27:39): Cool. Awesome.

John Janstch (27:40): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you both stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing, uh, podcast. And hopefully we will run into you on these that days out there in, uh, sunny California.

Colin Coggins (27:48): That’s

Garrett Brown (27:48): Right way, John.

John Janstch (27:50): Awesome. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mark Shekter. He’s a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and original thinker. He’s pioneered an entirely new system of creative thinking that empowers startups to Fortune 500 clients to build robust and sustainable enterprises, while reshaping corporate cultures for unlimited innovation and growth. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, Think8: 8 Steps to Ignite Your Creative Genius in Business, Career, & Life. He’s gonna talk a little bit about his proven method for unlocking creativity previously un or previously only available to his, uh, global Think8 clients. So, Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Shekter (01:39): Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (01:40): So, I, I first want to tackle the broad nature of your subtitle, um, that, uh, um, uh, unlocking creative genius in business, career and life. So, are you suggesting that this is a, uh, framework that you could apply if you were trying to advance your career, if you wanted a better life as well as grow a business? I mean, are you appealing to kinda anyone who wants to use a process to better something?

Mark Shekter (02:08): Well, the, uh, origins of the, of the process actually became in Hollywood where I was writing and producing, and I was very curious about having a hit. My agent said, you know, just write me a hit. And I said, thank you, Elliot. He was with William Morris. I said, easier for you to say. And he said, but that’s your job. So I just kind of embarked on trying to understand that element. How do I use my creative juices to up the odds, if you like? And it started there and all the research on these eight steps began there, but it then migrated because people in business outside of media said, uh, you know, could you come and give a motivational talk and mm-hmm. express how you do things? And that led to business. And then people were saying, well, you know, it reshaped the way I think about my career. And so what was happening is just this creative aggregation of ability and, and enhancement just seemed to kind of have a, a universal appeal. It wasn’t anticipated that way, but it grew into that kind of application, which was a nice thing to happen, but not anticipated initially.

John Jantsch (03:10): Well, and I could see that, and we’ll get into the, the actual eight steps, but, you know, a lot of them are things that you might actually associate with personal development. Um, but let’s face it, companies are made up of people, aren’t they?

Mark Shekter (03:21): Absolutely. . Well, it is all about, and you know this so well, John. It, it is the individual’s own and their capacity and passion and inherent ability, uh, to just formulate solutions. And if you give them the opportunity and the tools as you know so well, to be able to tap into this and then be able to execute their dreams, their passions, and so on, it’s a wonderful thing to behold. So the personal thing is always the focus, of course.

John Jantsch (03:51): So, so you actually talk, excuse me, introduce a, uh, a concept of, of, you know, rather than growing a company, uh, really unlocking a company’s true worth. I wonder if you could spend some time, um, explaining what you mean by that.

Mark Shekter (04:05): Absolutely. Companies typically, uh, would start when there’s an issue and they want to grow or, you know, um, expand exponentially. They’ll, they’ll tap into, or they’ll address the thing they’re making or how they’re making it. And where we start is the individuals behind that, that effort. And if they can up their creative quotient to solve those problems, they can solve any problems. So the focus begins with them and the ability of the tool and why it has proven itself is that, uh, people, regardless of their background coming around a table, an executive group aboard, they, uh, through the process are able to kind of find consensus, creative consensus and formulative vision that serves them all. And then that juice, that energy then is applied to solving that specific problem. But they also are empowered to solve, you know, uh, sustainable problems thereafter. So it, it kind of aggregates that, that consensus and, uh, ultimately the alignment around all of that energy, and this is seems to be the ticket, if you can get everybody, I guess you would call it organizational physics. Yeah. Where everybody is really on the same vector. They’re really pulling, you know, forces in the same direction.

John Jantsch (05:18): So you, it’s in the subtitle and you use it throughout the book. Um, talk about creativity, um, and kind of new thinking on the role of creativity even. Um, and I, and I do suspect there are some people that think, well, creativity, that’s like the art department or that’s, uh, you know, branding or, you know, that’s, that’s how we, you know, create some slogan or jingle. Um, but you’re really applying it in a whole different way, aren’t you?

Mark Shekter (05:44): We are. I mean, it’s, so, it’s, it’s, it’s a basic, a basic capacity. Everybody has it. You, you know, the way you’ve created your business, you, you bake a cake, you build a business, you’re, you’re still using that idea of a into a something. It wasn’t there before. And now it is. So if we can focus on, on innate ability and, and help somebody unlock it, and then give them a tool to execute that particular problem combined with that energy, that creative energy, it’s quite remarkable to watch. And it serves them in ways that they hadn’t thought about, rather than diving into, uh, how do we fix this particular problem? So it’s application for business and careers, you’re saying, and others is really opened up. Uh, it does offer a, a more, uh, abrasive way to look at creativity. It’s not just for artists. And, and you raise a real interesting point too, cuz we bring the business of art to artists and the art of business to business. And people think, I’m not, I don’t have it. I I’m not born with that. I’m sure you ran into your lap, you know, John, stay with what you’re doing or whatever. And you said, no, no, I see something else. I I I have something else in mind. And the creative capacity is inherent in everybody. And they can, they can do whatever they want if they realize that they can. Well, how do you open that up? How do you open those channels up?

John Jantsch (07:03): Yeah. Well, and I, I do think that, um, and there are others that are certainly on this bandwagon about, but I do think we have to redefine certainly in business what creativity is. Uh, I mean, I think, I think making a decision , um, you know, between path A or path B is a creative process, but, but so many people, you know, look at that as now that strategy or that strategic thinking. But you know, every, almost everything we do in business takes some sort of element of creativity, doesn’t it?

Mark Shekter (07:31): Absolutely. But it’s a question again of where do you start on that process? Yeah. And you know this very well from your work. When a person, this was the research, this was kind of the thing that opened it up for me. When a person taps into what they really meant to do, what they have actually examined their inner talents, their abilities, innately, it does turn on the juices creatively. It’s fascinating to watch because if they aren’t focused on something that is meaningful to them, they think less about it. They, they don’t seem to draw all their experience together to focus on a solution. So that creative energy, um, is sort of ignited when starting with just understanding what they’re really about and what their worth might be. And that’s a, a very personal process which is addressed in the eight steps, actually, the step number one.

(08:22): Um, but it is, it is basic to all, by the way, definition we use of creativity in business, but in life and career is . And you’ll love this cuz it comes from learning, you know, in Hollywood ideas abound, uh, an idea fully executed. Mm-hmm. Just get it done. And that’s genius to me. Anybody has an idea and they go, you know, I think I’d like to do this and that. And I go, well, here you go. Here you go. And they go, did it. Yeah. I just, hats off. I’m an admiration of that process.

John Jantsch (08:52): But that’s the, that’s a great definition too, because mean the graphic designer can say, well that’s really what I’m doing with the logo , right. Is I’m, you know, fully executing an idea. So I mean, it, it certainly applies to the more traditional creative arts as well. So let’s, let’s get into the eight steps. And you, you hinted at the first one being purpose. Now I have to, um, I have to challenge you on this one only because, um, you know, every business book you pick up today says . Absolutely. You’ve gotta find your purpose. And I don’t know anybody who really has, actually no, I shouldn’t say that. That’s a very tough step for people because they sit around a room and say, what’s our purpose? Okay. Is everybody agree on those eight words? Good

Mark Shekter (09:31): ? Well, it is the question and yeah, how many, you know, we go on site and you type in purpose, of course you get this millions of, the way we define it, uh, is really an impassioned reason, impassioned reason for wanting to create something. We keep it very simple, but we also make a distinction between a product purpose or product y and a personal why. Oftentimes, uh, people will jump in and go, well I wanna create this, uh, toothpaste because it whitens teeth. And we come back and go, why are you into the teeth whitening business at all? And it’s fascinating when we sit down with a group of executives and we say, what’s the purpose of your business? And they’ll say, um, I want to build a car. I wanna build a really good car. I wanna build a family car. I wanna build an inexpensive sports utility car.

(10:22): We have never had the same answer just asking that question from an executive team. But that’s just the beginning because behind their choices to be in that business, in that place at that time, they’re coming from life and experience and something that if you can tap into the real motivation behind their work, you know this so well, something happens and then when that thing happens, it is beyond the purposefulness of the tool or the item or the service or the consulting. It’s something that is meaningful to them. And I think the biggest thing we find, cuz our work has also been adopted into business schools where people have never asked themselves, I’m chasing an opportunity, but is it, does it matter to me? Is it meaningful? Mm-hmm. And they’ve never, they don’t seem to get access or nobody ever asked them why they’re into accounting or doctoring other than I wanna help people. But that’s a very general statement. It’s steeper than that. We,

John Jantsch (11:16): I I was gonna say is what the interesting thing about that is a lot of people would just tell you, I don’t know. I mean it’s like, this is what presented itself when I was in school, and so it seemed like a path and I did this and 30 years later, I don’t know why I’m doing this.

Mark Shekter (11:32): Well, what we’d have them do in the process is we’re very tactile. Yeah. Uh, while we have a platform digitally doing this, we also on site have them actually write down without overthinking the things that come to mind. Yeah. And there’s a whole process that we employ that I developed with my wife, Nancy Kin, who co-developed old program, and they put it down, put it down, and the things that come out are the craziest and wonderful things. Sure. And there it is, but it’s, it’s, it is the process we take them through. Your, your question is absolutely dead on. I don’t know. I don’t know, but you know what, it’s buried and we can go back and tap in and we find it, we always find it, but it can be very buried or somebody said, that’s silly or get real. You know, you know what that, that’s like be real. You honestly not now, not time. It’s the world isn’t ready for you and you’re going, I gotta follow this thing. Yeah. So, uh, it’s there to be found and, and we’ve been very fortunate to be able to actually unlock it.

John Jantsch (12:33): And I think one of the great things about a process like this that is very structured too, is, you know, I, I think the real challenge, especially for like business owners is we sometimes just don’t give ourselves the space or permission to have these thoughts. Uh, you know, because nobody asked us. They’re asking us like, how do we get the order out the door ?

Mark Shekter (12:50): Exactly. Well, yeah. One of the interviews that you held and so on, I thought the questions were really wonderful, Nemo and so forth, any of us asking and trying to understand your past. And when you start to answer the question, if I read about you and didn’t understand that part, I would’ve missed the whole part. Yeah. Because what was coming out was your journey and your passion and what made you just stick with it. Uh, there are people that come to us that have done everything. I mean, you know, all of the major consultancies and so on, they’ve been through it all and they go, I don’t know, you know, we’ve got the bottom end. We seem to kind of understand systems operations, but something isn’t turning over. We have a mission statement, we have a, you know, these various things mandates. And I go, do you love it? Do you just love it? And they go, nah, . Uh, and uh, and we learned this again coming from, uh, Hollywood background stuff. You pitch an idea to somebody and they’ll go, this is really great. I’ll get back to you . And if you have the confront, you go, you don’t love it. You really don’t love it, do you? No. No. I think it has real. No, no. Honestly, if you loved it, you’d be screaming up this chain and so on. And so you see the

John Jantsch (13:58): Tip. Get, get get me Matt Damon on the phone, right? .

Mark Shekter (14:01): Exactly. Precisely. I’ve had people chase me down the hallways to close a deal that I pitched as opposed to, this is really interesting, mark, thank you so much. You know, we really appreciate your time. And you go, it’s a no, you know, just let’s just deal with it what it is. That’s not to my mind. You know where we’re going for, we’re going for that really intense, passionate purpose, but it is findable. Everybody carries it. Everybody.

John Jantsch (14:28): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean, pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And where HubSpot comes in, HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one. And it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like Content Assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual task and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(15:33): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process. It it’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(16:19): So as we’ve mentioned numerous times or eight steps, I’m a little disappointed you couldn’t come up with an acronym. Um, you know, that seems to be the the thing to do in, in, uh, consulting to call it something. Um, but you know, then you’re like twisting words to make ’em fit into plus plus an eight letter Scrabble word. I mean that, that’d be a tough one anyway, wouldn’t it? ?

Mark Shekter (16:39): Well, what’s happened in business is it’s become a verb. Yeah. Literally, I’ve been in meetings and they go, we did a think eight on it. A noun in a verb. We think aid it. You gotta think aid it, it is, you know, looking for those words. Duct tape by the way. Brilliant. Looking for that. And who is you? So I couldn’t give duct tape eight didn’t go there. . Right? . But, but I went, um, well what is it about it? And it is different way of thinking about things. It is the new thing and the work we do, and then the training we give to executives and so on, we talk about new think and all things. The old thing being the more conventional be real type of thing and the new things in terms of just going for it and out of a passion and a desire to do something significant, you know, so we just stuck with think and eight were the eight steps. So, you know, it, it just, it went together and that’s how it’s growing. You know, you sort of hit it and people just use it and use it and use it. But we’re delighted. Of

John Jantsch (17:30): Course. So, so I’ll run through, uh, quickly, purpose, message tone, character content, structure, style impact are the eight. Um, obviously pick up the book because that’s where you’re gonna get the full description. I wanna focus on number four for a minute, uh, character and you define as the company’s core values and beliefs. Do I, again, I don’t think anybody would argue that that’s an important step. That’s another one people really struggle with. Uh, you know, it’s like, these sound good , these should be our beliefs, right? . But I think another challenge that I, that I see a lot is, you know, the founder has beliefs. That’s not necessarily everybody who’s drawn to the visions beliefs. It’s not the stakeholders, the shareholders, it’s not the customer’s beliefs necessarily. How do you balance kind of the, the fact that you almost need multiple, I don’t wanna say multiple beliefs, but you, you, you’re providing value to multiple audiences in different ways. How do you kinda rectify that?

Mark Shekter (18:27): Well, first thing to understand, and it’s new obviously, uh, for you in terms of your acquaintance, but those eight steps form a scale, a sequence from top to bottom. So by the time we get to character, we have examined purposefulness. They’re, uh, level of commitment, but basically what they stand for, what they’re trying to tell their public, the way they’re emotional engagement, which is the tone when we get down to character. And, and keep in mind by the way, it might be for an individual we’re doing this, but for a group, they’re all putting their thoughts and ideas and they find something that holds it a piece of everything that they’re talking about. So consensus is really fundamental to the process and alignment. And so when the executive senior management have all contributed, sort of democratize that process, rather than having it given to them by a branding company or a PR company, yeah.

(19:17): They’ve worked it out and they’re saying yes, that, that, that’s a piece of it. Yes, yes, yes. And they have that agreement and it is possible to get it. We do it. Then when they hit character, this is the support, the foundation where they go, well you’ve been talking about cars, but what do you feel about automobiles? What do you feel about, you know, EVs, what do you feel about the economy, the worldview? How do you feel about money? How do you feel about helping people? Social responsibility? Mm-hmm. , what happens is you start to get into the heart and soul of the business. And it’s quite interesting. Everybody carries this, but they don’t really, like you said, they don’t have the forum to express it. We give them the forum when all of that’s in place. Those top four are really about them. The bottom four get into the more traditional product structure.

(20:04): That’s the content and the structure. But again, that sequence really makes it possible. So it doesn’t become the, the, the conclusion isn’t, we have a mandate, we’re gonna do the cheapest and the best for the maximum amount of people and da da da da da da. Nobody loves that. We’ve been in meetings, I’m sure you’ve seen them, where they’re sitting there in the middle of the meeting, another memo comes out and it’s another mission statement, . And they look at each other and we’ve had it happen in Europe. We were right in the middle of it. They go, what’s that? And they all gathered around and said, oh, oh boy. And they closed the computer. And person aside, there’s nothing motivational. Now, when the management knows who they are, to your point about how to respect stakeholders and, and lower management and those on the floor, they the vision of a business and there’s something they can decide to roll with it, or they disagree, they can leave. Honestly, they can, but their stakeholders, they feel the energy. PR companies, ad companies can work with it because the brief is clear and there’s a commitment, there’s an authenticity. So character, transparency, authenticity are synonymous.

John Jantsch (21:09): So you finish up the steps with impact. Um, and I think that, um, it’s interesting. There are a lot of people that maybe they go into business thinking impact, but at some point they wanna make impact. And I, and I think this is a little bit, um, if we’re gonna be cliche and use the sort of the Maslow’s hierarchy, right? Right. I mean, you’re never gonna achieve impact without the other stuff. Are you? I mean, the other steps have to, you can’t just say, I wanna make this impact and here’s how I’m gonna do it. It’s like you gotta get, you know, the, you can’t transcend , you know, without having, you know, food and water. Right,

Mark Shekter (21:41): Exactly. But in your case, okay, coming back to you, do you recall a moment when you saw the totality of where you’re going? Like when you said, I’m doing this, but I think I can do, and actually opened up, you hadn’t, you hadn’t arrived yet, but you saw where it could go. Did did you have that kind of a moment? Do you know what I’m talking about?

John Jantsch (22:03): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I can, I don’t know that I’ve arrived yet. Uh, but I would say that, um, um, you know, when I started seeing the impact that some of my writing was having on people, so it weren’t people that I wasn’t meeting had never met, you know, and their writing to me saying, you know, my business is what it is today. You know, because of some words on paper, um, that if nothing else to me really drove home the point of look at this sort of permanent impact you’re having.

Mark Shekter (22:32): Right. But even in the present, even though you haven’t arrived at it, if you took the time, and I’m sure you, you, you, you’re a thoughtful person. So if you look at where you would like to go, the reason I ask is that when we sit down with executives, when they hit that spot mm-hmm. or an individual or an entrepreneur, I just don’t wanna limit it to executives. It’s like you say career and people in life and whatever, they have a tough time with that question because they tend to minimize mm-hmm. their dream. They’ll literally start with, there’s a wonderful purpose. And they get down to the impact and you’ll go, well, what do you think? And they’re going, well, I’d be happy if, and then I’ve seen the crossfire going, what do you mean you want this? Why don’t we 10 x that?

(23:13): Well, I don’t, you know, let’s go step by step, but what are you dreaming? What are you dreaming? So the impact is really a statement, the way we approach it of an ideal scene, the ultimate result of all of their efforts. What do they wish it to be? And if they wish it, they can make it. So, but they tend to shy away from the wishing it’s surprising. It’s really, but if they do it and they actually have to be coaxed into this, it’s quite a music we find. And then suddenly they go, yeah. And then suddenly everything kind of shifts in that company and the systems change and the com communication changes cuz they’re all going for it. Yeah. It’s not dreaming. It’s actually the last point of having worked through all of that. So it’s hard to jump to that without, again, that sequence. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:59): Yeah. It’s, I i I think a lot of times when, you know, people might think of it as a dream, you know, what they’re, what they’re really doing is just being very intentional, um, absolutely. About where they’re going. So. Absolutely. So, um, mark, you wanna tell people where I appreciate you something by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where, uh, where they can connect with you, find out malware about your work, and obviously pick up a copy of Think8.

Mark Shekter (24:23): Well obviously the website, uh, think8globalinstitute.com, um, Amazon, the book is there, and on the 24th of May, um, the soft cover comes out. We have that digital download right now, the Kindle version. And uh, you know, I thank you for the opportunity, John. Um, as I said, you know, and have been through processes and I know you love processes and you know, when people, uh, talk to me about process and they go, how can creativity be a process? And I explain everybody has one. They may not articulate it, maybe in the shower, three cups of coffee, but they have their process. Yeah,

John Jantsch (25:00): Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for, uh, stopping by and, uh, hopefully we’ll run at, into in the road or in Montreal one of these days.

Mark Shekter (25:09): , it’d be a pleasure. Thank you.

John Jantsch (25:11): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.