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.

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, and my guest today is Diana Kander. She’s a keynote speaker on Curiosity and Innovation and a New York Times bestselling author. She’s a serial entrepreneur who has entered the United States as a refugee at the age of eight, and she has launched and sold millions of dollars of products and services. Today we’re gonna talk about a book she co-authored called Go Big or Go Home: Five Ways to Create a Customer Experience That Will Close the Deal. So, Diana, welcome back to the show. This is at least your second, maybe your third time.

Diana Kander (01:30): John, thank you so much. I hope this isn’t two forward, John, but I was so excited to be on this show. I created a jingle for you, . You’ve been in business for so long and I, I feel like it might be the only thing missing. So let’s, can I share it with you? You’re,

John Jantsch (01:47): You’re gonna way no matter what I say anyway, so , I’m ready.

Diana Kander (01:50): Alright, here we go.

John Jantsch (01:52): Okay.

Diana Kander (01:55): Duct tape.

Diana Kander (01:56): Woo.

Diana Kander (01:58): We’ll make your branch shine like new with duct tape. Woo. We’ll make your brat stick live glue with duct tape. Woo. Marketing is tried and true with duct tape. Woo.

Diana Kander (02:14): . Did that sound good on your end?

John Jantsch (02:16): That sounded amazing on my end. Yes. There’s

Diana Kander (02:18): A little muffled in my headphones,

John Jantsch (02:20): But it’s to, I wanna know how, I wanna know how you did it.

Diana Kander (02:22): It’s to the theme of Ducktails, of course.

John Jantsch (02:25): . Oh, well, I’m sorry. I’m too old for that. Oh, no, I think my kids are too old for that is what I really mean. So I wasn’t familiar with that. Okay. Sorry.

Diana Kander (02:35): Very popular cartoon. Sure. In the nineties when I was growing up, and I just thought, what a perfect match.

John Jantsch (02:42): Well, I certainly appreciate all of the effort that went into that. I bet you didn’t even have to use chat g p t to write that. Did you?

Diana Kander (02:51): Uh, chat g p t was kind of helpful, I’ll be honest. I’ll be honest.

John Jantsch (02:54): , yeah, I believe it. So that was, that was like, you’re going big, wasn’t it,

Diana Kander (03:01): At the very beginning. John, I wanna show you that this interview is gonna be different. People are gonna get a lot more than they’re used to out of it.

John Jantsch (03:09): So as I said, you’ve been on several times. This is kind of a, this is a, I don’t know, is this a different hack? Would you describe this book as being very different from your books on, say, curiosity? I mean, obviously you’re talking about pitching things and you know, you have some, I was gonna call ’em crazy ideas. Um, , that’s not what, that’s not what I really meant, but outrageous in a good way. Ideas. So I, I guess the first logical question is, you know, what kinda led you to this idea? Right now?

Diana Kander (03:40): I didn’t want to do this book. Actually, my co-author, Tucker Trotter called me. We had a mutual connection and he was like, Hey, I wanna write a book about my company Dimensional Innovations. They create experiences for like sports stadiums, universities. And I was like, good for you. You know, you enjoy that. I am so not interested. I, I did the call on my treadmill walking my dog, like, just could not have shown less interest, you know? And he said, Hey, will you come take a tour? Like, I get it, you don’t wanna do the book? And I said, fine. And so I went and took a tour of their 200,000 square foot facility, which is like, so impressive. And then during the tour, he tells me that they have this move to close big deals, this move where their usual close rates like 45% when they do the move, they close 90% of these huge hard to win deals. Right. And that got me really interested. And

John Jantsch (04:36): So I said, well, at least had to know what the move was. Right. .

Diana Kander (04:38): That’s right. . And so I, I talked to a couple more people and then I talked to some of their clients, and then I became obsessed with it. And I was like, well, other people must be doing this, and why does this work? What is the science behind it? So by the end of it, I was begging him to co-author this book. I just had to tell other people about how this works. Yeah. So I, I had to tell this story. It’s a slight departure from the innovation work, although I do think it’s a way to innovate how you sell your products and services. Yeah, for sure.

John Jantsch (05:05): Completely. And quite frankly, there’s a huge element of curiosity, I think, to the framework. So that’s how it works for me. Yeah.

Diana Kander (05:11): .

John Jantsch (05:12): So in the subtitle, five Ways to Create a Customer Experience that Will Close More Deals. You want to, you want to kind of dive into a couple of the elements. So people need to buy the book if they want them all, but Sure.

Diana Kander (05:22): Uh, for your TV viewers Yes. The five elements spell out the word magic, and we’re basically creating magic inside of our presentations. We don’t want them to be instantly forgotten as soon as we walk out the door, which is literally what happens. Right. And so there are five things you can do to help increase how memorable your presentation is and how actionable it is. Do you want me to tell you what they are?

John Jantsch (05:46): Yeah, I mean, let’s start with surprise.

Diana Kander (05:49): That’s the best one. .

John Jantsch (05:50): ,

Diana Kander (05:52): You gotta do things that they don’t expect. John. And did you see my mug?

John Jantsch (06:00): Yeah, of course I did.

Diana Kander (06:02): For the audio listeners, you gotta tell them what’s happening.

John Jantsch (06:05): So she just took a drink of, I’m guessing a tequila, but yeah, , who knows? But it was in a mug that had the duct tape marking logo on it that I did not supply to her.

Diana Kander (06:17): A brand new marketing Go Duct Tape Marketing logo. Congratulations on that. Thank you. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think you need more schwag with the new stuff on it. We do with the new logo on it.

John Jantsch (06:26): We do. My wife won’t let me get anymore though. .

Diana Kander (06:32): So Surprise is all about doing something that is unexpected. Our brains love to be on autopilot, even when we’re being pitched and they’re basically saying like, do I know what’s happening next? And when somebody’s presenting, usually it’s, it follows a very similar pattern. So when you add an element of surprise, people are like, okay, I have to pay attention because Right, right. What’s, maybe there are other fun surprises happening.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a bit of a dis I mean an interruption too, right? I mean, just like you said, a lot of times we lull people to sleep with what they, because they have an expectation. Okay, this comes, now this is gonna come down. And it’s like, whoa, I didn’t see that coming. And I think as you said, it kind of snaps somebody back into attention, doesn’t it?

Diana Kander (07:16): Yeah. I mean, if you think about what your body does in a surprising moment, yeah. You open your hands and open your eyes and open your ears. Like you’re just taking in as much information as possible. And when we’re pitching our idea, that’s what they’re taking in all the way as opposed to putting their guard up and Yeah. Kind of taking a, a, you know, step back approach.

John Jantsch (07:38): Do you want to give an example from the book

Diana Kander (07:40): Of

John Jantsch (07:41): Crazy of using Yeah. Of a surprise that worked?

Diana Kander (07:44): No, I wanna keep doing surprises on here. John, I know that you’re a woodworker. I, and so I created this Duct Tape Marketing apron that you can use in your shop. Do you love it? ? How great

John Jantsch (07:56): Does this look? I do love it. I do love it. Are

Diana Kander (07:58): You, I’m gonna be sending it to you after. I was gonna

John Jantsch (08:00): Say, you have no use for any of this. So ,

Diana Kander (08:04): I’m gonna load you up on Duct Tape swag. Okay. After this,

John Jantsch (08:07): I do wear an apron when I do my woodworking.

Diana Kander (08:10): Now you have an extra one. .

John Jantsch (08:11): Now I have an extra one. . So that leads me, actually, unless you want to go go more surprise on Surprise. But my you’re like,

Diana Kander (08:19): What else do you have back there?

John Jantsch (08:20): Yeah, exactly. Bring it . You gonna have just like one at a time? Let’s see the whole show. All right. So, so years ago in Duct Tape Marketing, and I used to do this in my practice, I wrote about something I call Lumpy Mail, where instead of sending somebody a letter, we’d send them a box of Cheerios or something with, you know, a message that was tied to what we were trying to pitch. And you talk a lot in this book about physical objects, and I’ve seen it work, but tell me about how it goes into your Go big framework.

Diana Kander (08:49): Well, there’s just a fascinating science to why physical objects work, but basically they are like a faster pathway to our memory banks. The same things that process visual information are in the same part of our brain that process emotions, which is how we make decisions. And so if we just hear something or read something, it doesn’t have as much of a memorable impact as if we see a physical 3D object. And th this has made such an impression on me, John, that I do not enter any meeting without a 3D object of some sort. Even if we’re on a Zoom call right now, like having a mug with their logo or something that shows that you have taken this invisible idea, which is a lot of our products and services are invisible ideas, and you’ve taken it into the tactile world. It just makes such a huge impact.

John Jantsch (09:44): Don’t you also find that it, it sends a little message is, Hey, this is an important thing to me. I took some time to actually do something that, you know, not everybody else does. I mean, in the world of just mass LinkedIn connections and mass emails, I mean, just showing that you took actually a little extra time. Doesn’t that, you know, doesn’t, that actually isn’t that part of the power of it?

Diana Kander (10:05): I think that’s at the heart of the Go Big or Go Home Method. It’s showing your soul to people. It’s showing who you are as a person and that you care about them. Can I tell you that for the last two days I’ve been walking around my house like singing duct tape, woo . Like I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been thinking about you and how excited I am to share this thing with you. And I think it shows you how much I care and how much time I took for this. It’s not just another thing for me.

John Jantsch (10:32): That’s right. That’s right. So can I see your shelf of all the other, uh, mugs that you have?

Diana Kander (10:37): all the other mugs? .

John Jantsch (10:39): I might get jealous then though, huh? Right. .

Diana Kander (10:42): It’s in a different room. The theme song is brand new. I’ve never done that. And I have certainly never created a woodworking apron for anybody

John Jantsch (10:49): Else. . 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 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.

(11:55): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. In some of the materials you sent me about the book, you were very adamant about something that people should stop doing when it comes to pitching. Yes. On trying to know what it is.

Diana Kander (12:51): So one of the five tools is to give the pitch in the right order. Mm-hmm. . And unfortunately the vast majority of us are doing it in in the wrong order. This is how a pitch usually goes. It’s like, Hey, let me tell you a little bit about myself. That’s number one. Yeah. Number two, let me tell you a little bit about my, about my company. And then number three, I’ll tell you why you should buy from us. And that makes sense, right? At a rational level, we want them to understand us so that they understand who they’re buying from. But the thing that we learned is that people don’t care about you at all until they know that you get them. Right. So that’s backwards. We have to start with, Hey, I get you. And then once I establish that foundation, then I’ll tell you about myself. Then people wanna know who they’re buying from or who they’re taking information from. But until I establish that level of I get you and you want to be here, it does, the rest of it doesn’t matter.

John Jantsch (13:51): You know, that’s really interesting because, uh, so many of these principles really apply to everything we’re doing in marketing. I mean, I for years have been talking about websites. You know, you go there and the first thing it says is, here’s who’s we, here’s who we are, here’s what we do. And you know, I tell people all the time, nobody wants, you know what we sell, they want the problem solved. So like, promise to solve my biggest problem, which does show that you got me , but it’s also gonna get my attention. It’s like, because I think a lot of times people don’t even know what their problem is. They just know something’s wrong. And it’s like you’ve put your finger on it for them and it’s like, yeah, now I wanna know the rest. But everybody does do that in reverse. So you’re talking about a probably a physical pitch, but I think it’s really that that runs true probably for almost every kind of contact or engagement we would have. Isn’t it

Diana Kander (14:37): Anything? I mean even these calls, you know, you would usually start with people like saying like, tell me a little bit about yourself. And people are like, well of course I would love to tell you about myself , but I start these interviews by saying, let me tell you something about yourself first. Yeah. And maybe your audience. And then once we establish that foundation, then I’ll share a little bit about me.

John Jantsch (14:57): Yeah. Cuz the truth is I really only care about myself. , I’m asking you the question because you know I’m supposed to Right

Diana Kander (15:03): There, there’s a science to it. John , our brain actually releases dopamine every time we talk about ourselves in the same way that it does when we have sugar or sex. Like it’s a powerful drug. Yeah. And that’s why when you start talking about yourself, you can’t seem to stop because it just feels so good. So if you do an interview or a pitch and you feel real good afterwards, that’s the dopamine high. And that is a false sense of confidence that you have afterwards. You should feel like kind of okay. Because you let the other person do a lot of the talking.

John Jantsch (15:34): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. And that’s such an easy thing, quite frankly. I mean, we’re wired as humans to maybe not think that way, but I think if you just like put a big sticky note there and just, you know, really start it that way, I think people would find that, uh, it would change everything about the conversations they’re having in general. Wouldn’t it? I mean, that could, that would go for, wouldn’t that go for networking? I mean frankly,

Diana Kander (15:55): Anything. And I, I’ll tell you, we have a tool in the book, which is kind of a map for you to think about your presentation. I do my podcast interviews on it too. And it’s basically what am I gonna do at the beginning to Right. Get their attention and make it about them? Then where am I gonna insert points of magic throughout the conversation? And then what is the big finish of how I’m gonna end?

John Jantsch (16:17): Yeah. I think you ought to finish with the Standup Comedy Act that you just did.

Diana Kander (16:22):

John Jantsch (16:23): Speaking of dopamine.

Diana Kander (16:25): Yes. That was, I just did a standup. I’ve been wanting to do it since I was 17 years old. I am much older than 17 now. I’ve been waiting 25 years for this. And a friend of mine created a safe space for it. It was a sold out room of 260 women. Yeah. And I finally felt like I could do my six minutes.

John Jantsch (16:45): Yeah. Yeah. Was there wine involved too? I mean, there

Diana Kander (16:48): Was a lot of wine. Yes. for the audience. I think that’s very key for the

John Jantsch (16:52): Comments. Yes. Yes. And poor Jason, that’s all I’m asking.

Diana Kander (16:55):

John Jantsch (16:56): What a sport. No, that’s like the easiest subject in the world for comedian, isn’t it?

Diana Kander (16:59): Spouses,

John Jantsch (17:00): Yeah. .

Diana Kander (17:02): I have a lot of spousal content that didn’t make that show. So yes, you’ll be happy to know there’s enough for like a whole second act.

John Jantsch (17:10): All right. So you outlined some memorable pitches as we call them in the book. And do you have a favorite memorable pitch child?

Diana Kander (17:21): It’s hard to pick. I’ll tell you my co-author’s favorite pitch. So in the story, which is Nap Hide, which is the company that makes work trucks. Yep. And they’ve created, they’ve turned their sales process into a just magical experience that almost feels like Disney World for people who are buying work trucks. . Yeah. And all throughout, there’s these moments where it helps their customers connect with them on a completely different human soul level. That’s really where we got that idea. Like it helps these moments, magic moments that we try to help you create, help people connect with you on this much, much deeper level than a typical transaction. And so, you know, they’ve engineered a process that really works. My favorite pitch in the, in the book is that of Sarah who used it to get a job. So I, we talked about how this works in a lot of different applications, but I do think it can help people get jobs. I’ve now helped five people. It’s like my side Hobby get jobs using the go bigger go home method.

John Jantsch (18:24): You’re a job maker. Yes. Like a matchmaker. Right?

Diana Kander (18:27): . But like a lot of people that I’ve talked to, you know, they’ll get to the final three and then they just don’t get any further and they don’t know why. Right. And unfortunately it’s because you didn’t create that moment of connection or memorable. And this can help you do it. And so Sarah’s story is, she had this job she hated, she was making $50,000 a year, she did a go big or go home pitch. And at the end of it she got an email that said is a hundred thousand enough? Which is like, what a great offer. You know, .

John Jantsch (18:58): That’s so funny. So, so is there a risk of going too big? I mean, to where you, I mean you just, people are like, that was weird. I mean there’s sort of this like, be memorable and this like be weird Right. Level isn’t there? Yes. . Yes.

Diana Kander (19:14): I mean, like if I had a brand new Mercedes pull up in your driveway this morning and I was like, Hey John, really looking forward to the podcast. Like yes, there are of course lines and

John Jantsch (19:26): I don’t get it. Where’s ? Where’s that over the top?

Diana Kander (19:30): And you have to, it has to be reflective of you. Like that’s the whole thing. It’s you’re showing your authentic personality. So if you start creating jingles like I do, it might not work as well because you’re not as excited about it as I am. So I, I just think it’s about every person finding their heart and being able to display it in a physical way to their audience.

John Jantsch (19:52): Yeah. S so how do you pinpoint, like publishers wanna know who’s this book for, right? Like yes. And they want it to be broad, but they also wanted to be obvious . And I think that that this book and as we’ve talked about it, I mean this is personal brand. I mean all this is down to like, I just wanna have more friends, you know, almost level, right? All the way up to c e o of major companies thinking we have to rethink our entire engagement process. So how do you work with the fact that, I mean, how do you help somebody know this book’s for you? That’s my real question.

Diana Kander (20:24): So our, our very simple initial premise is this book is for B2B companies that are selling and it can double their close rate. That’s what we’ve seen it do. Because they’re turning their sales process into a sales experience. Yeah. And yes, there are other people who can benefit from it. My side hobby of helping people get jobs with it. Yes, of course nonprofits have used it to raise money. Sure. But I think at the core it’s helping businesses that are in a market where they have to compete and they don’t wanna compete on price. Yeah. This is an exceptional way to compete on soul.

John Jantsch (21:00): And he, here’s the good news. You correct me if I’m wrong. Yeah. You, the title of this could go, could be just go a little bigger . I mean, because the bar’s pretty low, isn’t it? Yeah.

Diana Kander (21:14): Yeah. So it’s about thinking about every step of your customer interactions and thinking where can I add a little bit of magic to this? So you can even, the smallest step you could go is your signature line. Like why use a traditional signature line and not one that reflects a movie that you love or something about your personality that just really allows you to shine through. Do you see how silly it is to Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:36): Yeah. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . So many, so many lines in that movie that reflect me. So I’m gonna start doing that now.

Diana Kander (21:44): Whi which of the, each of these moments, John, helps us connect. Sure. That’s the whole thing. It’s about like when we’re trying to pitch a business deal, people are like, you’re not human. I don’t care about your thing. And then as soon as we can break through and allow them to see us as a human being, then they can’t help by connect with us. Yeah. Yeah. And then we got ’em.

John Jantsch (22:03): So, so I have, I’ve, you know, spoken in events where the, you know, they wanna do a goofy thing like tell us your favorite movie. So we’ll announce that when we’re introducing you. And it is funny how people will come up afterwards and it’s like, I just stalked for 45 minutes. I told you some brilliant things. The only thing they remember is that I like Ferris Bueller’s Day off because I do think you’re right, we’re looking for our tribe and it’s like, oh, if you like that movie that says everything I need to know about you. That’s right. Thing. So that connection, you know, part is so big and it is, you know, you talk about memorable, being memorable and I think have most of the game is cutting through. You know, you talk about those people that maybe a thousand people do, you know, send in resumes for a job. Like how do you cut through that ? That’s right. You know, so. Absolutely. So Diana, it was as always, I got more than I expected in having you on the show. Tell people or invite people where you’d like ’em to connect with you. I know the book’s available, you know anywhere,

Diana Kander (22:54): John, I didn’t just bring presents for you, I brought presents for your listeners. They would be not fair for me to do that. So the book is available on Amazon, you can find it there, but if you want to get a digital copy, I’m happy to just send you one for free. All you have to do is send me an email, tell me why you want one. My email address is diana@dianakander.com and I wanna share this idea with the world. So if you don’t wanna buy it, I’m happy to send it to you.

John Jantsch (23:18): Okay. And we will also put that generous offer and link in the show notes. So go out and get it and be more memorable. How’s that Go big Go

Diana Kander (23:27): Home. Do you want me to send us off, John?

John Jantsch (23:29): Yeah, go . I dunno if I, I don’t know if I should stop the recording now or ,

Diana Kander (23:36): Just one last one.

(23:41): Duct tape. Ooh,

(23:43): It’s catchy.

John Jantsch (23:45): Get up and dance. Come on.

Diana Kander (23:47): Woo. Make your Brass stick Live glue with duct tape. Marketing is tried and true with duct tape. Woo.

John Jantsch (23:58): I’m gonna lose so many sponsors over this

Diana Kander (24:01): .

John Jantsch (24:04): Why? No, I’m, because I’ve given you trouble. It’s amazing. This is probably the best show I’ve ever done and you know, people are gonna enjoy the heck out of it and it’s always great to catch up with you and, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you again, one of these days in person out there on the road or in Kansas City or wherever we bump into each other.

Diana Kander (24:23): Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (24:26): 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, and my guest today is Mark Mears. He’s a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and consultant. He serves as the Chief Growth officer of LEAF Growth Ventures, LLC; a consulting firm inspiring individuals, teams, and organizations to find purpose and fulfilling their true growth potential while making a positive lasting difference in the world. And we’re gonna talk about his fairly new book titled, the Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways To Grow From Leader to Legacy Builders. So Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Mears (01:30): Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:32): Well, as listeners know, sometimes I, I like to start with the title and break some things down. And so I want to just, can I ask you, how do you define purposeful growth as opposed to, I don’t know, growth ?

Mark Mears (01:44): Well, I think the whole emphasis on purpose is on important. Is important, and it’s on purpose because purpose matters. And it’s not because I say it does, it’s because all the research suggests it. It is a very important part of what we’re all here to do. And while we all think maybe of purpose is some sort of noun or thing, like I gotta find my purpose, uh, I I I really look at purposeful as a better word cuz it’s an action word. Mm-hmm. . And I believe we’re always growing up into our purpose. And when we know what that is, we can grow more purposefully into that vision and that version of ourselves. If, if, if you just grow and you’re really not growing on purpose, you could be like a weed and you’re just kind of Yeah. All you know, like, you know, all over the place. Right? But when you really laser focus in on who you are, who you are, and what we’re all put on this earth to do based on the unique skillsets and gifts we’ve all been given, then you’re fulfilling a purpose over time. And that word fulfilling is also very important.

John Jantsch (02:55): So, so I know that in, in looking at your bio, you, you spent a deal of your career working with very large organizations and you know, many of them would say, well, yeah, this is a good idea, but we have shareholders that we have to care about. We have, you know, our growth has to be measured, you know, maybe in a much broader, deeper way. It can’t be somebody’s, you know, individual vision, you know, what would you say to somebody who says, well, that’s a good idea, but ?

Mark Mears (03:22): Well, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time doing research and I’m also a member of a global organization called Conscious Capitalism. And it was based on a book that was written by Whole Foods co-founder and Seed. Yeah. John Love John Mackey and Raj. Yeah. And so they really break down this whole idea that it’s not an an or proposition, it’s an and proposition. And some of the most profitable companies in the world are some of the most philanthropic and are the most purposeful. And so when I hear that as someone who spent over 20 years in the C-suite, and I was, I, I, you know, I was consciously, I guess, capitalistic before I ever heard the term because I just believe that you can do well by doing good. And if you think about what’s been going on specifically during this covid era with the great resignation, which I call the great repurposing, which we can talk about Yeah.

(04:23): For quiet, quitting, and according to Gallup, historically low levels of engagement among team members. And then you juxtapose it by saying, well, why did people leave the workforce? And you look at the study that the Sloan School of Management at M I t, uh, conducted over 34 million people who left the workforce during Covid and asked them a simple question why the number one answer, John, over 10 times more than the second most given answer was toxic work environment compensation didn’t come up until number 16 on the list. So when you think about pragmatically in a boardroom, you know, I believe you have four stakeholders, and I think it’s all about stakeholder balance. You’ve got your team members, not employees, you’ve got your guests or customers or clients. You’ve got your business partners, which could include shareholders if you’re pub publicly traded, like several companies I’ve been part of are.

(05:20): And then you have your communities. And, and if, if you think that purpose plays a huge role, if that’s a four circle Venn diagram, think of that as purposeful growth right in the middle, all revolving around it. And, and now breaking it down even further to some of the CFOs who say, well, I’m just all about metrics. Fine. You like profit, don’t you? Well, what’s the largest line item on most PNLs? It’s usually labor, right? Yeah. So think about the cost it takes to find, recruit, hire, train, recognize, reward, and retain a team member. And what happens if they leave? It creates a vicious cycle where you’ve gotta re yeah, repeat that process all over again. Not to mention the, uh, engagement loss of others who may be disgruntled or maybe the cost of replacing others and or, you know, the cost of, of loss of productivity because that person left, it takes time to, to fill it.

(06:26): So in black and white, the notion, John, of purpose and profit is much more aligned than it is purpose or profit or purposes, a rounding error. Maybe we’ll get to it. It’s a nice feel good. Yeah. We’ll throw a little something into the charity basket. That’s not the way business is being done today. Nor do I believe it’s the way that we will be able to recruit the best and brightest because many of them are asking their interview questions right now, am I gonna be able to fulfill my purpose here? Or what’s the purpose of this company over and above profit? They really want to know that, especially among the younger millennials and Gen Z.

John Jantsch (07:07): Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, I’m not debating that in any way, shape, or form, but I do think a lot of organizations, you know, it takes time to build that culture. It takes time to build the processes that are gonna drive purpose deep into the organization. And I think that people just get kind of shortsighted, don’t they? And think, oh no, we just need more sales.

Mark Mears (07:25): That, that’s why I call it the purposeful growth revolution, John. It’s because this really is a revolution. It’s taking place. And many companies are jumping on board and others are gonna follow because that’s the new way of work. And if you think about the idea of, I looked at, at brands as a, a branding expert, most people say, well, there’s one brand, it’s, uh, whatever. It’s Pepsi, it’s Coke, it’s McDonald’s, it’s whatever. I think, no. Then we heard, well, there’s two brands. The internal brand, the external brand, well, I believe there are four brands. There’s the personal brand that each and every one of our team members, including ourselves, has, whether we know it or not, it asks the question, who am I? And then the internal brand is the collective we of the organization, which then asks the question, what do we stand for?

(08:18): And then the third brand is the external brand that goes to the end user, the client, the customer, the guest, and the community, which should ask the question, what, what value is being exchanged here? And then finally, there is the employer brand that is really taking off because of the scarcity of finding and keeping good quality people. And that asks the question, do I belong here? And belonging is so important, John. We talk about d e i and we should diversity, equity, inclusion. But if you think about it, diversity just gets us in the door. Inclusion gets us a seat at the table, and equity gives us an equal voice and all that’s great. But if we don’t feel like we belong, we’re probably not gonna feel vulnerable enough to give of our very best, because we’re just happy to be in the room where it happened.

(09:10): Right? The quote Hamilton. And I think that’s really the importance today of making every team member feel like they’re a valued member of the team. I’ve come up with an acronym called Love Listen. Mm-hmm , observe value and empower. And if you think about those four very powerful components to building a lasting, loving relationship, well then you’re not gonna get the quiet quitting, then you’re not gonna get the resigning and moving on to somewhere else. Uh, you’re gonna get people that build that team mentality. And, you know, I’m blessed to live here in Kansas City and we have the Kansas City Chiefs, and we just won the Super Bowl. But after that game, you saw people making plays who didn’t make plays all year, but they played their role in their moment. And that allowed the whole team to persevere and ultimately win the game’s, grandest on the game’s grandest stage.

(10:13): And so making people feel like they’re a valuable member of the team and empowering them to be their best, whatever their superpower is, allow them to, uh, to really maximize that for the benefit of the team. You wouldn’t say to Patrick Mahomes, Hey, you’re a pretty good quarterback, pat, but you know, you can’t tackle for crap, so we’re gonna put you on the defensive line to round you out of bed. That would be a waste, right? But I’ve been in companies where they’ve done that and they’ve said, well, you’re really good at this, but we went, we went around you out. And they, they, they, they put me or other people in these, you know, uh, these areas that they had no interest in, no aptitude in. And they finally kind of said, look, I’m just, I’m gonna leave and go somewhere where my true talents are, you know, allowed to shine, and I could actually have help getting them to be even better.

John Jantsch (11:00): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. How 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 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.

(12:05): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s 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.

(12:51): Well, as a chiefs fan, I, I would say that it appears Andy Reid is actually very good at that, what you just mentioned, you know, getting everybody to step up and play their role. Mm-hmm. . Yep. Another point in concept of this book is the, the, the difference between leader and legacy builder, as you call it. Um, I wonder if you could spend some time kind of unpacking that concept.

Mark Mears (13:11): Absolutely. You know, John, everybody seems to want to learn how to be a better leader. That’s great. I mean, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry from Yes, yes. It’s, you know, what we’re doing here, podcast to conferences, to seminars, to webinars, to e-newsletters, you name it. And if you google the word leader or leadership, you’ll get 1.7 billion with a b hits. So we know people wanna learn how to be a better leader and that’s great, but not too many people are asking a question, how do I create a legacy and in fact, a living legacy? I don’t wanna wait till I’m dead and beque something. Not that definition of legacy, but yeah, every single day, how can I create a living legacy that ultimately creates a ripple effect to where I can support you on your growth journey, and then you’re gonna want to do likewise.

(14:08): So it comes back to my personal brand and I wrote a purpose statement and it says, I don’t want to just make money and retire. I wanna make a difference and inspire. And that means making a difference in the lives of others and inspiring them to wanna do likewise. So it creates this virtuous cycle reciprocity, or what I call paying it backward that helps elevate others and inspires them to wanna do likewise. And now you’re creating a living legacy and, and suggesting that leadership is important of course, but making a difference in the lives of people and aspiring them to wanna do likewise is really where that, uh, term comes from.

John Jantsch (14:51): So if somebody’s saying to themselves, they read the book, they’re listening to this podcast, and they’re saying to themselves, this makes a lot of sense. We need to do this at our organization. And yet, you know, the environment and the culture is what it is today, . And so walking in is saying it’s a new day sometimes is tough. So what are some of the maybe small steps, uh, that can show you wanna move this direction? Or what are some of the first places company might start going to try to make a change, uh, in the culture?

Mark Mears (15:18): Yeah, and you know, John, and throughout my career, I’ve, I’ve had the good fortune to be in some companies that lived into its purpose.

John Jantsch (15:28): Yeah.

Mark Mears (15:29): And now many people would call it a culture, but what I’m, what I love to do is look at words deeply. And I believe that a community is better than culture. A culture may just be something you’re part of. A community is something that you can belong in. And where there’s that sense of belonging and that sense of teamwork, you know, I liken it to a rowing team where all orbs are in the water rowing together. It’s called swing, I’m told. And it actually lifts the boat and, you know, propels it swiftly through the water. The Cheesecake Factory, when I was the chief marketing officer, there was one such company, but it starts at the top and the CEO has to be bought in, uh, because otherwise it can turn into some flavor of the month initiative. Or if it comes from hr, it’s like, well, it might get patted on the head and say that cube, but it has to come from the leader.

(16:25): And the leader needs to understand that this idea of being purposeful will in, in allow all shareholders that the rising tide that lifts all boats, it will help attract and retain and engage team members, right? So they’ll, they’ll be more productive. It will, uh, trickle to your customers or clients or guests depending on what your industry is, and they’ll notice the value that exchange and, and see that’s more profitable. We know that, um, companies who are more purposeful, there are people now that are, are, you know, going to those companies and spending more because they believe what I believe, right? And then your shareholders and your business partners, anybody in that business ecosystem is going to be lifted up because you’re gonna be more profitable. And then the communities in which you serve, and it could be your immediate community, it could be regionally, it could be nationally, or could be globally, are gonna benefit from your purposeful living and the way you take the profits that you make and distribute them. Or maybe it’s your business practices, maybe they’re more sustainable and in some way you’re helping the world be better because you are in it. Now, if I were a CEO and I have been and someone were to tell me that, I’d say I wanna listen. Yeah. I mean, let, let me read this book because that it is a playbook for how to grow a company from just being a company who makes widgets and earns a profit to a company that literally creates this community of which many people, all four stakeholders benefit.

John Jantsch (18:14): Yeah. I’ve had, there’ve been some recent books on this topic and I’ve had guests on this show that have talked about community from a marketing standpoint is actually being kind of the last frontier that, you know, that all the digital stuff and all the tactics that you know that people play in, you know, the most potent one is building a strong community.

Mark Mears (18:34): Yeah. And I think, you know, during Covid, we, we all, I think got a little some time out to really reflect deeply on not only what you bet who matters most in our lives. And I think while we were sequestered in homes and doing meetings via Zoom or other digital platforms, I think we all realized how much we need community. And when you think about this idea of, you know, who matters most, I go back to the Simon Sinek model and start with why. But I believe instead of just the why, how, and what he’s missing, something very important. The who, the who you serve when you think about it, four circle then diagram cuz they’re all intertwined like our four seasons, right? It could be spiritual, relational, personal, and professional. We’re whole people. And that’s why I put that emphasis on the personal brand that is just now starting to gain more traction instead of you’re hired and you should be glad you got hired and here’s your paycheck and you should be glad you’re getting a paycheck to, that’s, I wanna treat you as a whole person and I wanna treat you as a team member cuz I don’t want you resigning or quietly quitting or, or all those negative things.

(19:54): I really want this enterprise to succeed. And now based on this notion of who you serve that serves as a foundation for then how you plug in to that collective we of the internal brand that then leads to how you deliver the value to the external brand and then how you recruit, uh, engage and retain team members through your employer brand. So it’s all intertwined and revolving around purposeful growth.

John Jantsch (20:23): So I noticed on your website, like all good consultants, you have an assessment where somebody can actually kind of yes,

Mark Mears (20:30): Maybe

John Jantsch (20:30): Get a baseline on where they are and some of those, uh, things you want to invite people to where they might find that, find out more about you and connect and obviously I, I know the book’s available pretty much anywhere in the

Mark Mears (20:40): Books. Yeah, yeah. Thanks John. You can go to my website, which is markamears.com. And right there you’ll see a link that you can create or your own or take your own self-assessment. Takes about five, six minutes and it does go through the four kind of segments of the book. And it’s like providing a benchmark of where you are now as it relates to how you feel about purpose and, and also how aligned your organization is. And so that you can see if there are gaps, what needs to happen to fulfill them. And if you’re a company, I’ve also put together a brand assessment where I can take what you’re currently doing and see how aligned it is with what your team members are saying and then come in and help you close those gaps. So the assessment is really a great tool to begin the dialogue. Once you complete it, you can download a copy of your customized report and so you can buy the book, the Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow From Leader to Legacy Builder. It’s available on Amazon in paperback hard cover and ebook as well as Barnes and Noble and probably other places books are sold. And then if you would love to connect with me, you could do that on LinkedIn. I would love to get to know you and talk further and build a relationship with you.

John Jantsch (22:04): Awesome. Well Mark, thanks so much for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you, uh, one of these days. Next time I’m in Kansas City or on the road somewhere.

Mark Mears (22:14): Excellent. So is it true you’re gonna send me a role of duct tape as uh, kind of a

John Jantsch (22:19): No, we’re fresh outta duct tape. It’s funny though. Thank you. Over the years pe people have certainly sent me lots of different duct tape mementos. So again, thanks so much Mark and uh, appreciate you stopping by.

Mark Mears (22:30): My pleasure.

John Jantsch (22:31): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com. co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): 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 I’m going to do a solo show. That’s right, no guests. Today I’m just going to rant and rave about a topic near and dear to my heart. That is strategy marketing strategy. Now, don’t tune out if you think you’ve heard it all before from me. As you know, we have also been working using the AI tool ChatGPT to enhance our work. I do not, it is not a replacement tool. It is a research assistant. It is informed automation. It is an idea generator, so it really supplements the work that we would do by hand, but it just makes it faster. It makes us smarter, it helps us, uh, think of things that we perhaps, uh, forgot. So what I thought I would do is, I mean, you’re probably getting bombarded.

(01:46): It in fact is probably the 10th time today you’ve heard somebody talk about ai. I tend to take a much more practical view of these things. And so I am gonna talk today very specifically about the ways in which we are using, uh, AI tools to help us create, uh, more potent marketing strategies for clients in, in some cases more developed, more richly enhanced with research. But again, it’s just a tool to help us do that. So I thought I would go through what I did is, and I’m gonna give away for free at the end of this, I’ll share a link. There will be a link also on the show notes for this. That gives you a group of about 50 prompts. You know, prompts for those of you that aren’t using AI are, is really kind of how you get output. You tell it to do something that’s called a prompt.

(02:39): It then outputs what it thinks you want based on that prompt. So one of the keys to really getting good output in AI is good prompts. And so we spend a lot of time testing and retesting prompts. And so I’ve created what I think is a, you know, very potent page of prompts that I’m going to share with you and give away that, that really kind of break down the whole process of how we develop strategy. So by following these prompts, by seeing how we’ve broken up the prompts into certain pillars, brand industry leads, CX customer experience, it, it really gives you a, a very good feel for how we view strategy in general. So if you’re somebody who is working on strategy, if you for your own business, if you are someone who does strategy for clients, as you know, we have the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

(03:40): We’d love to certify you, uh, in our fractional CMO process. And this will give you a real taste of how we view strategy, how we’ve, how we develop strategy. Obviously, this isn’t the entire instruction manual , but I think that it’ll give you an idea of how comprehensive we think about it. So the very first section of prompts that you’ll reach, we typically do, we do study the online presence of a client that we are working with. Some of these tools make it actually very easy to get an assessment of a website keyword research for an industry. So it gives us a, a head start at looking at content and reputation and social media and just even SEO under the hood. And so that’s something that we do in every strategy. We want to get a sense, you know, our online presence today is businesses is a, it’s a very significant aspect of how we are seen by the market.

(04:34): And so we certainly wanna start there. The next thing we do in strategy is help people narrow the focus of who their ideal client is. Uh, let’s face this, as cliche as it sounds, you know, the 80 20 principle is alive in business. Typically, what we find is that some 20% of of a customer’s clients produce close to 80% of their business. Repeat business referrals, profit in many cases. And so, and yet, you know, we’re all nervous about narrowing focus because we’re thinking, oh, we’re gonna exclude these other people. But you know, my contention all along is if we focus more attention on that top 20%, we focus on finding more of them, really everything is going to be better off. So we have a couple prompts that really get into, you know, empathy mapping process around buyer personas, but also concerns, you know, that we can write a prompt in a way that will give us, say, a list of the top 20 things that make people who are our ideal clients, you know, lie awake at night, , and we could ask the, the tool to actually give it in first person and make it emotional.

(05:45): I mean, it’s the kind of stuff that, it’s the voice of customer. It’s the stuff that people are saying out there. So that’s certainly one area competition. You can actually use these tools to do a pretty good job of assessing what to be strengths and weaknesses of a handful of competitors. So, makes it very easy to do this kind of research. This is probably a good place for me to note. It could all be wrong, it could all be inaccurate in these AI tools because that’s just where we are right now. So use this as a tool, but test read. Don’t just don’t copy and paste anything here because there’s certainly a long way to go, but it’s a great assistant. It’d be like, if you gave some of this work to a, you know, a, a low paid virtual assistant that you found online, you certainly wouldn’t just take it as gospel.

(06:32): You would hopefully give the assignment and you would get work back and you’d hope it was good, but you’d certainly test and you’d, you’d learn what it does. Big part of what we do is develop what we call core messages. A core message is not a tagline, something pretty to put on a business card. Maybe it goes there , but essentially it is your strategic promise. It’s your brand promise. It’s, here’s the problem we promise to solve for you ideal client, here’s a problem that matters to you that we’re going to solve. So what we want to do with that now is start testing it. So one of the great things that we have today, I mean, we do still do, uh, one-on-one interviews. That’s a great way to certainly get across this idea of, you know, understanding the problem that you solved for an actual client.

(07:18): But today, Google Business profile reviews is also a great resource because people turn there and they typically talk about what a great experience they had or the problem they had or what they’re not getting, you know, from other people. So we can actually ask the tool to scan all through the reviews and give us some sentiment, like, what are some themes that are coming up? Uh, what are some things that that, you know, seem to really be addressing problems that we solve? So, pretty easy to get a headstart there. We can then play around with the creativity in the tool and ask it for some core marketing messages. Maybe even parrot down to seven to 10 word kind of tagline, maybe some marketing headlines for promotional materials. Again, based on going all the way through the reviews, we’re simply saying in the voice of the customer, you know, what are some ways we should be saying some things?

(08:05): It’s not gospel , it’s not cut and past, uh, but it’s certainly, uh, very helpful.

(08:11): 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.

(09:12): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(10:02): Another couple little kind of throw in, uh, opportunities is you may not, especially if you’re a consultant, you may not know that much about a particular industry of a client that you’re working with, but you can certainly use it to ask it to give you industry trends, threats, opportunities, you know, for businesses in that industry.

(10:20): It could be really eye-opening to, if nothing else, to hear it in the language of your client. That’s another thing that I think it really does a good job of is picking up the vernacular of a particular industry so that you’re saying things, you know, even in your, uh, presentations, you, you are, you’re putting ’em in the words that make sense to the industry or to the client. We have a very, as many of you longtime listeners would know, we have a very specific approach to developing a customer journey. It’s something that trademarked IP that I call the marketing hourglass. The marketing hourglass relies on essentially guiding seven behaviors, seven stages, no, like trust, try by repeat and refer. And a lot of what we try to do in that hourglass is try to understand, you know, what would, what are tactics or processes or campaigns that we need to be intentionally, you know, putting at each stage, regardless of what industry we’re in, obviously the industry may dictate many of the tactics of, you know, how somebody comes to know about you.

(11:21): You know, what they would, what would mean trust to them in order to buy. We can use the tool to just brainstorm, uh, a list of those, uh, stages in the customer journey. One of the things that AI does or has the ability to do, because it is essentially been taught, um, the, the, the everything that’s put into it is, um, if there are processes out there, if there are frameworks out there, like the marketing hourglass that people have written a lot about, um, it, it will actually be able to access that, uh, content. It will know what the marketing hourglass is, for example. So you can pick any framework that you’re familiar with out there, and there are many consultants who’ve produced frameworks. You can actually put it, you can actually identify companies or identify, uh, brands or identify individual, uh, say experts on topics.

(12:13): Um, and you can actually ask it to access, you know, their bank of knowledge and put it into a certain way that you wanna see it. Content is essentially a tactic, but it shows up in our strategy approach because we quite often are asking people to rethink the way they viewed content, to really look at it as a strategic element to look at it as something that is going to be a useful resource rather than just another challenge. Marketing challenge. We produce something called content hubs. And these content hubs are a completely different way to view, um, producing content. We still use blog or content management system technology, but we don’t use it in the, in the sort of fa linear, chronological fashion that people come to think about blogs on. So I have written, um, probably talked, um, in a previous show about that idea.

(13:06): Uh, we’re able to quickly put together outlines. I will say that, uh, ChatGPT wallet is not great at writing actual content. Meaning like, give me a thousand word blog post. It is very good at outlining things. If you give it a topic, a kind of big broad topic and say, you know, create an outline for the ultimate guide to X, it’s actually very good at that. It will also take, and this is pretty clunky, but you know, you can tell it to give you a 90 day editorial plan and say, include social posts, include newsletter topics, include blog posts. And again, it will give you a bit of a plan. Then you can start diving into, uh, very specific, uh, platforms like video. And you can take maybe post content you’ve already written and say, give me topics, that would make great videos.

(13:53): You can follow that up and say, okay, I like this topic. Write a two minute script on this topic. And if you’ve already got the topic written, it’s saying a blog post or an a webpage or something, it’ll draw from that and turn it into a video script. It’s pretty cool. We certainly, you know, for a lot of industries or folks that come to us, you know, webinars and LinkedIn and Facebook groups are important, uh, places for them to access. So we often will use it in the same way to outline, certainly to create webinar topics, but then to outline those webinar topics as well. I would never cut and post these, but you can actually tell it to give you some detailed LinkedIn posts, for example, for your industry. You certainly can give it continued guidance. So you don’t want these to be promotional, so you tell it, make them primarily educational.

(14:39): Highlight the firm’s expertise. Those quite often can be, you know, a lot of times when we’re working with somebody, they don’t know what to write on their LinkedIn profile, so we can give them 10 idea starters. For example, sometimes Facebook groups are a great place, uh, to hang out, for example. Well, sometimes it’s a lot of work to go find those groups , but, uh, the AI tools can actually, you could tell it, give me 30 Facebook groups in this industry with contact details and you’re gonna get 30 Facebook groups. Now it’s still up to you to go check ’em out. Does it seem like a, a group I wanna be a part of or a group that I wanna participate in to share my expertise, but it’s a headstart. Same with podcasts. If you are a business that needs to be on podcasts, and frankly, I can make a case for many people to be podcast guests, we put it in most of our marketing strategies.

(15:26): Again, the research to find the top 30 podcasts related to your industry with contact details can be some work. Put your, your informed automation assistant, ChatGPT to work for you. We go into, in this, uh, sheet that I’m sharing the prompts, I’m sharing lead generation and lead conversion. These will be basic tactics. But again, it’s a great place to start. If somebody’s thinking, well, I, I’m, I’m doing these two things, what else could I do? Uh, great, you know, channel recommendations, specific tactics for each customer experience, again, for a particular type of firm, you put in the, the name of the industry of the firm, and then you, or I’m sorry, the name of the industry that the firm you’re working with or your firm. And then, you know, you tell it to act as a marketing consultant. Create, you know, onboarding, retention plans, employee recruiting plans, you know, all again, won’t be rocket science, but it’ll be a headstart.

(16:19): And then finally we end up this particular group of prompts that, uh, overarching strategic initiatives. Like if we want to, you know, act as a marketing consultant, create a list of more than, or no more than five key strategic initiatives that would give blank industry firm wishing to grow a competitive advantage. You know, questions like that or prompts like that will get you started on some ideas, on some projects, on maybe some campaigns. Maybe it’ll tap into some trends that they see as opportunities. You never really know sometimes till you play with it. But I invite you to get our AI prompts for developing marketing strategy. There are a lot of people out there that are producing all these, you’ve seen them 2000 prompts to do blah, blah, blah, and they, you know, the prompt says, write a blog post , or, it’s just random stuff.

(17:04): What I’ve tried to do with this gift, if you will, is to make it very focused on you’re trying to accomplish a set result really with these prompts. And they’re not just kind of random one off things that you might use. Some of you might not use others. So hopefully this approach, uh, you know, is very, if nothing else, is very eye-opening to, you know, some of the ways that you might use prompt. But I think, uh, prompts. But I think additionally, I think that this is a tool that could be very useful in developing marketing strategy or could give you some insight into how we develop marketing strategy. We’d love to work with you if that’s something you need for your business. And I’d also invite you to of course, check out the fact that we license our methodology for building really what is a fractional CMO practice using, uh, this kind of tool, our strategy first approach.

(17:53): So that’s it for now. Thanks so much.

(18:18): 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 was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent, an episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsh, and my guest today is Steve McKee. He is the co-founder of McKee Walworth, a nationally recognized marketing advisory firm that has made the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America and its first year of eligibility and has twice won the prestigious Effy Award for marketing effectiveness for the American Marketing Association. We’re gonna talk today about his new book called Turns, where Business is Won and Lost. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve McKee (01:30): Great to be here. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (01:32): So I guess we need to define what you mean by turns. I mean, what is a turn in business?

Steve McKee (01:38): The, it’s, that’s a really great place to start it. The original concept for the book started as a book about turnarounds, corporate turnarounds. Mm-hmm. , because that’s what my company does for a living.

(01:46): And I just got very intrigued with that whole metaphor of the turn. And so it certainly includes big turns, like a corporate sweeping corporate turnaround, but little turns as well. The decisions that we make every day in business, either intentionally or that are foisted upon us that change the destiny of our companies and careers forever, which is a pretty big topic.

John Jantsch (02:09): So I, I think it’s like a lot of those things that, that you don’t know they’re happening while they’re happening all day long. Right. So, I mean, what’s a typical day of turns, you know, look like for an entrepreneur?

Steve McKee (02:19): It’s really remarkable. I start in the book with, I, I kind of get pretty, pretty narrow about it. Just the simple fact that the route you take to work in the morning could affect your whole day, could affect your whole life. The what you decide to have for breakfast, I mean, there are little decisions we make, little turns, if you will, that can have a big impact. In the day of an entrepreneur. Really any decision you make is a turn, because by definition a turn is when you’re heading one direction and you’re no longer heading that direction, you’re heading a different direction. So it could be a sweeping turn, like a new product launch or, you know, refocusing your company, or it could be a minor turn like, uh, or a less sweeping turn like who you hire or who you fire or how you price your products. Really, literally, every day we’re making decisions that are turning our organizations, and as I said, our careers, whether we realize it or not.

John Jantsch (03:11): So I can almost start to think of if people start realizing, you know, it’s like breathing. We don’t realize we’re breathing all day. Right. And then somebody tells us, you should pay attention to your breath. And you’re like, wow, I do this thing. You know, we can only do it for about two minutes. Right. But I can imagine people starting to say, oh, well, if I start to look at every decision I make and like start to analyze it, I mean, I’m gonna be exhausted by like 9:00 AM Right? I mean, so, so how, I mean, how do we take this like, okay, recognition, this is happening, there’s these decisions making, I mean, how do we decide Yeah. , which we should decide about .

Steve McKee (03:47): Yeah. I, the best analogy I’ve come up with this, it’s like driver’s ed, I don’t know if you remember back when you were taking driver’s ed, however you took that, when you’re trying to keep the car between the yellow lines as a new driver and you’re swerving back, it’s, and your hands hurt and your arms hurt and you’re panicked and the whole thing. Yeah. Once you learn the principles of driving, you can almost forget about it and it’s muscle memory. Yeah. This book, there are eight principles of turns and it’s meant to be a reflection on those things so that you can think about the turns in the past and the turns in the present, of course the turns in the future and how they work and the ramifications. But then yes, you have to sort of let whatever sinks in, sync in and then go about your day.

John Jantsch (04:27): What role does hindsight play in this? You know, I know I, I get, I’m on a lot of shows podcast myself and you know, a very common question is like, you know, what’s one thing you would do different? You know, that kind of thing. And it’s like, well, yeah, I can tell you now , you know, but certainly at the time I maybe made it, maybe it was an unconscious decision that paid off or didn’t. But you know, how much is hindsight, you know, a role in kind of, of analyzing turns how they worked, worked out? Yeah.

Steve McKee (04:54): It’s how we learn honestly. Right? Yeah. One of the, of course I go into the example of auto racing in the book, and if you’re on an oval racing in IndyCar or a nascar, how you took the last turn is gonna affect how you take the next turn because of the conditions of the track and the wind and the, and so forth. And the same is true in business, the physics of it, right? , every track is different. Every day is different depending on what tires you have on the vehicle are different when de pit is different, all those sorts of things. Same thing is true in business. Hindsight is where we learn, we took a turn and we either took it well or we took it poorly or something was thrown at us that we didn’t expect. And if we reflect upon it, we can learn not only about the forces that are affecting us, but the timing of the turn and the decisions we make and our emotions as they were involved in the turn. These are all factors that matter.

John Jantsch (05:39): All right. So I’ve got my three year plan and it’s mapped out exactly what’s gonna happen, you know, 36 months from now where our revenue’s gonna be and this is a plan and we’re sticking to it. I mean, how much does that sort of mentality in business get in the way of intuition turns and opportunity that arises or the opposite of that have just lost a focus? Because I’m willing to take anything that looks like a new direction.

Steve McKee (06:03): Yeah, it’s that delicate balance in life. One of the things I’ve said about this book is we tend to think of life as a series of straightaways interrupted by occasional turns.

John Jantsch (06:09): Mm-hmm. .

Steve McKee (06:10): And I actually believe that life is a series of turns interrupted by occasional smooth stretches of road. So we have our five year plans. Just as when I left the house this morning, I had the route I was gonna take to work in mind, but when I came across a closed road, which literally happened this morning, I had to adjust. And I think there’s a balance there. What is it? Eisenhower said, plans are nothing but planning is everything. Yeah. We have to have the plans, but we also have to recognize that they’re not gonna happen e exactly as we laid them out. And how we navigate those turns can make all the difference. That’s why the subhead is where business is won and lost. You don’t win or lose typically on the straightaways. You learn when things are dynamic and changing. You have to outmaneuver your competitors, you have to make sure you don’t run off the road, all those sorts of analogies.

John Jantsch (06:56): Do you find that, that if somebody embraces kind of this idea that they will actually find themselves avoiding turns or maybe looking for turns as opportunities in a heightened way?

Steve McKee (07:07): I think probably the latter, honestly, because the exciting thing about the more we learn about turns is the more confident we are in taking them and making them, I don’t see a desire to avoid turns because really the lesson of the book is too bad, , you can’t avoid them. They’re just gonna happen. One of the, one of the big lessons of the book though is if you recognize that turns are where businesses won and lost, would you wanna look for that turn where you can get the advantage over your competition or over the past or what have you? So I think it’ll make me people more, maybe, maybe to continue the auto driving analogy, the better you are at navigating turns and driving a car, the more likely you are to want to race it.

John Jantsch (07:45): . Yeah. You know what’s interesting? I mean, I’ve been doing this for a really long time and I can, I can physically remember times when I would say to myself, things are going too smooth. You know, things are almost getting boring. I feel like I’m doing mediocre work. And, and I would almost be excited with a challenge at that point. I mean, how does that fit into your principles?

Steve McKee (08:08): I spoke to the roadway engineer who literally wrote the book on roadway turns and he educated me. It was, it’s, it is really remarkable what goes into that. And he says that what engineers reali recognize that it’s better to have a number of shorter turns in a row for a driver than to have straightaway and then interrupted by a big turn. Because we get conditioned if thing, if the road is turning regularly, we get conditioned to it turning in. So we’re more ready and able to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So that too, if you are on a long straightaway, well that’s when you put on the cruise control, that’s when you fall asleep and up comes a turn and you can run right off the road. Whereas if things are continually turning, you’re alert to it. We talk in our business a lot about turns in business and that, you know, like the tech industry turns so fast, uh, I wouldn’t wanna be in it, give me an answer, but at least tech are aware of that. Yeah. Whereas in, in other industries that turn more slowly, what we see in our consulting practice is that there are companies that are being run off the road and they don’t even realize it until it’s too late. Yeah. Because they think that everything’s just gonna continue the way that it has in the past.

John Jantsch (09:10): Yeah. And to some degree, even if they see the writing on the wall, they kinda stick their head in the sand sometimes because it’s, you know, the change that they see coming is gonna be them killing the golden goose, you know? And that’s a hard one for somebody to swallow, isn’t it?

Steve McKee (09:24): It is a hard one for somebody to swallow. And that’s again, one of the messages in the book is the turn is coming. It doesn’t matter whether you want to take it or don’t want to take it, it’s happening. Yeah. So learn how to do it. Yeah, yeah. And embrace it.

John Jantsch (09:36): And now word from our sponsor, Hey, are you sick and tired of wasting your precious time on tedious tasks, like pulling reports, rewriting blog posts, and trying to personalize countless prospecting emails? Well say no more because I’ve got some new AI tools that are gonna blow your mind. Introducing HubSpot’s newest AI tools, content assistant and chat spot. Content assistant uses the power of open AI’s G P T three model to help you create content outlines, outreach, emails, and even webpage copy in just seconds. And in case that wasn’t enough, they created chat spot, a conversational growth assistant that connects to your HubSpot CRM for unbeatable support. With chat-based commands, you can manage contacts, run reports, and even ask for status updates. The easy to use CRM just got even easier. Head on over to hubspot.com/artificial intelligence to get early access today to both content assistant and chats spott.

(10:48): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days, or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(11:35): So how about the, the, maybe it’s a metaphor, maybe it’s not actually a metaphor, but the fork in the road, you know, for a lot of businesses. Yeah. Because when you think of a turn, you think of, oh, I need to go this way, but what about that? Like, which way ? Yeah. Do I go and this is like life or this is death, or I don’t, you know, I don’t know. I mean, how does that play as a out, as a turn?

Steve McKee (11:57): That’s probably the most common kind of turn. We tend to think of turns as like 180 degrees. Very rarely our turns 180 degrees. Most of the time it is that fork in the road that there’s a decision to be made that, let me put it this way, that what’s happening today is not gonna continue indefinitely. We’re aware of that so therefore we can go this way or that way. Or maybe sometimes there’s a third or fourth way that is a turn. Any, even a one degree change technically is a turn cuz you’re headed in a different direction. That’s really the probably the most common thing that we face in business. And I believe we face it literally every day. Yeah. It’s in big and small, dark,

John Jantsch (12:33): I don’t fly airplanes, but I’ve heard pilots talk about this idea, you know, when you talk about a one degree change, you know, you take off from Denver and if you’re one degree off the entire way, you’re gonna end up in Tulsa instead of, you know, Kansas City three big change.

Steve McKee (12:47): That’s right. . And the same is true in business. I mean, I think that’s a metaphor everybody can understand.

John Jantsch (12:51): Yeah. Yeah. Well I don’t want you to read the entire book because we don’t have time for that. Give us a flavor of, you know, you, you mentioned the eight principles and I know that, you know, change and contest and cause and moment. I wonder if you could just kind of pick out a couple and and give us a flavor for what they are, but then more, probably more importantly, you know, how do we apply?

Steve McKee (13:11): Yeah, I’d be happy to do that. One of, one of the surprises that I’ve gotten from my readers is the, one of the early chapters is called the Principle of the Object. And I thought it was more of a setup chapter, but it turns out it’s really affecting people. And the idea behind that is distinguishing the turn from that witch is turning is important. So the example I give is we call a turn in a roadway, A turn, but it’s really not, it’s just a non-linear distribution of asphalt. It only becomes a turn when something turns on it. And access is only an axis when there’s something turning on it.

John Jantsch (13:41): So it’s a philosophical book.

Steve McKee (13:43): Well it is, but the lesson there is if you, we need to separate ourselves. Yeah. Or our companies from the turn or else we risk getting our emotions all tied up in our decision making. Yeah. And as it turns out, no pun intended, I’ve had several people say to me that realization alone was worth the, you know, the price of the book. I think my favorite chapter is the principle of the contest and the whole idea is there, I went into the world of physics and looked at all of the forces involved in a turn from inertia to lean to torque, to friction, to gravity. Every one of those has a parallel in the business world. Yeah, yeah. And it’s just, it was just really fun to uh, basically provide a toolbox of a lexicon, if you will, that people can use to describe and characterize the turn that their business might be going through. And I actually suggest in the chapter that you get out, if you’re dealing with a turn, go to a whiteboard, write all those physical principles down and say, okay, what’s friction in this situation? What’s gravity, what’s torque? And it can be a very much a learning experience.

John Jantsch (14:43): You know, it’s interesting I’ve commented over the years, another thing people talk about is like what book has influenced you the most? And really for my work in creating marketing system and the IP that I’ve created, it’s a book on architecture and it’s kind of the same idea about building community and you know, about things being in a place and having a systematic approach to, and I think other subjects other than what, you know, we think we’re writing about or reading about or trying to teach, you know, can really inform, you know, like just as you said a whole nother language.

Steve McKee (15:15): Yeah. I was just meeting with someone this morning who’s in the middle of the book and the book is called Turns where Businesses Won and Lost and he said, this isn’t a business book . I said, you’re right. It is a business book but it’s also not a business book. Yeah. It’s about larger principles of life. Yeah, yeah. Of which business is a big part.

John Jantsch (15:32): So I mentioned that, you know, I’ve had my business for 30 years and I’ve often used the term seasons, you know, I have, you know, I’ve remade my business, you know, as we all have had to, especially in the marketing world. I mean I started, we didn’t have the internet, you know, as one of our channels so to speak. And so, you know, I’ve married, made my business at least five times probably, you know, substantially. And I’ve always referred to those as seasons, you know, that certain things would happen and then another thing would happen and that meant I was supposed to do this. And I don’t think I certainly, I wasn’t applying the idea of tur of turns, you hadn’t written the book yet, but you know, I feel like that’s another metaphor that would apply to to, to turns. I mean there’s a season, a turn for every season, so to speak.

Steve McKee (16:14): That’s right. And I actually talked about seasons in the book because Yeah. I had a realization one day as I was watching the Golden Leaves fall was during the fall off the trees. My realization was if this was the first time that ever happened, I’d be freaking out. Right now, , the world’s coming to an . The fact that we can enjoy Autumn as a season is because we know it’s part of a cycle or a turn. Yeah, yeah. Where the season’s metaphor breaks down in business, and I use it too, is that, you know, there are four seasons in the year and they tend to repeat and in business it never repeats .

(16:43): It’s just different phases. Yeah. Different seasons, different turns. And when you look back, when you look back over your life, and I can do this with my business and I’m sure you can with yours, yes there are turns that happen every day, but there are some notable market that day or that moment or that season was when we made this decision or this happened to us and that changed everything. I think everybody can reflect on that. ,

John Jantsch (17:07): I wasn’t gonna ask you this question, but just as you mentioned that I had Dan Pink on recently talk about his, one of his most recent books about regret or you know, no regret. And I wonder how, you know, when people start thinking about turns, you know, they start thinking about defining moments and sometimes there’s a defining moment that you can go, ah, I blew that one. You know, look back 10 years later and you’re like, eh, you know, that was a defining moment. You know, how much, how much I’m really trying to ask what a role, what role regret has, you know? Yes. In understanding, you know, these terms.

Steve McKee (17:39): I think that’s actually a helpful part of the book. What the technique I use is I go back and look at terms in history and science and religion, business as well. Sports, it’s a sweeping overview of turns and one of the things that, I dunno if I can say this is universal, but I think it certainly could be is rarely has there ever been a turn that starts positive and is only positive. Yeah. Or starts negative and is only negative. And like a very recent example was how awful Covid and the lockdowns were for all of us. But so much innovation has come from that, for example. Yeah. So it’s rare that you can find a turn that is entirely bad or entirely good and I think that softens the regret. It also causes you to be a little bit humble on the upside. Yeah. That, you know, not everything we do is brilliant.

John Jantsch (18:24): Yeah. That’s interesting though. I mean you can make a case for saying in some cases you need to be pushed into a corner. Yep. You know, to make the turn right .

Steve McKee (18:34): Yep. Something come to that dead end and there’s that arrow there . Yeah. It’s your turning.

John Jantsch (18:38): Yeah. But I mean, I guess what I was getting at is that that, you know, a lot of times people can just float on, buy everything fine and then they like get pushed into the corner, they’re bar ready to go bankrupt and then they can make the right decision because they have no choice in some ways.

(18:51): Or feels like if it’s, if it’s not, if it’s not too late, which yeah. Yeah.

Steve McKee (18:54): Master the turns before you’re forced to turn to avoid going off a cliff

John Jantsch (18:57): Before the steering wheel comes loose. So Steve tell people we’re where you might invite them to connect with you, but then certainly also to, I know you can pick up copies of turns anywhere you buy books, but where would you like to invite people to connect with you?

Steve McKee (19:12): Yeah. Turns: Where Businesses Won and Lost. You can get on Amazon, Barnes and Noble anywhere, my company is mckeewallwork.com. But just as easily you can go to steve mckee.com, it takes you to the same place I’m on LinkedIn if anybody wants to link up. And I’d really love to hear from people who’ve picked up the book and have some thoughts about it because everybody seems to be getting something a little bit different out of it.

(19:31): And I love that.

John Jantsch (19:33): Okay. I said I was done, but I’m not . Here’s the question that I hope everybody who interviews a asks best turn you ever made

Steve McKee (19:44): I , can I give you two?

John Jantsch (19:47): That’s gonna be a hard question.

Steve McKee (19:48): Well, I mean, the obvious answer was marrying the woman of my dreams 37 years ago. I mean, that’s not only the correct answer, it’s also true. I would say that I was forced into a turn to start my own company. Yeah. When a succession plan fell through at a previous, it was not a turn of my choosing. It has ended up being remarkable.

John Jantsch (20:06): Yeah. Yeah. I suspect answering that, anybody answering that question is tough because again, I, you know, I think most of it’s made in the hindsight, right, . Yep. So tough one to hear.

Steve McKee (20:16): It’s and it’s genuinely hard to say.

John Jantsch (20:18): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And who knows how many we missed, right. That we have no idea that we missed it,

Steve McKee (20:23): No idea that we missed it. And yeah. Who knows how many we’re gonna miss today.

John Jantsch (20:27): Exactly. Well Steve, it was great catch up with you again, as we pointed out when we were talking, it’s been 20 plus years . Yeah. Since, since we last talked. So I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you one of these days soon out there on the road. Super.

Steve McKee (20:45): Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (20:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com. Co. check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Belgray. She’s the founder of Talking Shrimp, a co-creator of The Copy Cure and is a copywriting expert who helps entrepreneurs find their perfect words to express and sell what they do in a way that gets them paid to be themselves through her work with hundreds of clients, including online biggies like Marie Forlio and Amy Porterfield. She’s seen firsthand that putting you into your copy and all through your business is pure magic for getting people to love you up and share your ideas and happily click your buy button. It’s like a copywriter wrote this thing, I don’t know,

John Jantsch (01:38): Her book. We’re gonna, her book we’re gonna talk about today is not necessarily about copywriting. It’s called Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re F-ing, when You Are The F-ing Worst. So, Laura, welcome back to the show we were just talking about, it’s been a few years,

Laura Belgray (01:56): It has been a few years. Thank you so much for having me back, especially to talk about this not necessarily copywriting book, Tough Titties.

John Jantsch (02:05): You, you know, in fact, I don’t know if it was you or publicist, but some, somebody kinda said, gosh, does John really want me back on this show? Because this isn’t a business book necessarily, but frankly what you talk about in this book, every entrepreneur goes through , you know, at some point. So it’s, I think it is an awesome entrepreneur book. It’s obviously a people book in general, but I think it’s an awesome entrepreneur book. Viewers can’t, listeners can’t see this, but, well, you can if you visit the show notes, but the cover, it’s got like a seventies wallpaper vibe. What were you trying to do there?

Laura Belgray (02:36): ? It’s actually more what I was aiming for is a t-shirt vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seventies, eighties. So it’s really a coming of age, not strictly in eighties, nineties, New York. It also gets into the two thousands and up to today. But there is for sure a retro vibe to it, especially to the early chapters. And I feel like I, I’m just really drawn viscerally to that, to nostalgia for, to the ephemera of that time of my growing up, of our, of my middle school years and my twenties. And I put together a Pinterest board for the cover, which I feel like they nailed the, it’s like a whole mood board of things like the Bubble Yum logo, right. And Pepsi Light and all the logos from that time. And I feel like they really nailed it with the Tough Titties logo just captured that like t-shirt iron on. Look,

John Jantsch (03:32): I was gonna say it kind of, it de it definitely reeks of pop culture that that’s how I kind of kind of see the, the cover. So again, I’m sorry Li listeners, , if you’re driving down the highway and you don’t know what we’re talking about, let me just, this is a stupid question, but I think it’s valid here. Why’d you write this book

Laura Belgray (03:50): ? It’s not a stupid question, it’s just a big one. I mean, I truly, I always wanted to write a book and I wanted to tell my stories. Like I, I do love telling stories in my emails and throughout all my copy and, but they never get to be the full story. I mean, you can’t write the whole thing. You can’t write a whole chapter in an email. And so there are many things, I always wanted to write a book and I probably announced many times over the course of the last 30 years or so that I was writing a book, I’m writing a novel, I’m writing a memoir, et cetera, and never followed through. And I was just thinking about this. I, it’s, I haven’t talked about it that much, but in around 2016 I met up with this online writer, a copywriter named Alex Franzen, and she came to a dance class with me.

(04:39): She was in the city and she, we were sitting on the floor stretching and she said to me, so, so tell me, do you have like a body of work? And I was like, well, I have my, I’ve got blog posts, , I don’t know, I’ve got my emails. I guess kind of that’s really hit me in that moment. Like I’ve gotta write my book. And I have always thought about it that way as my book, like the book that needs to be written. And so I finally really got writing on it in earnest in around 2019 after many stops and starts. And a as for like, why should it exist? I think it’s gonna, I, I feel like it has an audience with anyone who’s ever felt behind in their life or career or like they’re not very good with the supposed tos in life. The title Tough Titties is I see it as sort of the ultimate, sorry, not sorry for not doing life the way you all want me to. Like I’ve never, you know, learned to, I, I don’t drive a car. I never learned to roast a chicken and I never had kids and my career trajectory has been very windy as opposed to a straight hockey stick that it’s supposed to be.

John Jantsch (05:51): So it’s largely autobiographical. However, you know, you are trying to teach big life lessons too, aren’t you?

Laura Belgray (05:59): I am. I honestly, I thought I was gonna get to just slap together a bunch of stories that I like to tell, but I discovered through the process and from my editor who told me in not super careful delicate terms that it did, most of the stories didn’t have a point. The voice was all over the place and she basically said, what are you trying to say here? And I realized then that just like I tell everyone to do with their emails, like every story you tell has to have some sort of point, especially if it’s in a book it can’t end with like, and it was really funny, the end , you know, anyway, it was so embarrassing. Next chapter, it has to arc to some meaning. And my editor reminded me a few times cuz I was resistant to this. I was like, I’m not, this isn’t the how-to, it’s not a self-help book. I’m not doing takeaways, spoonfed takeaways. She’s like, but you know, people still want some wisdom there. They do want some life lessons. What did you learn from this? So it took some work to infuse it with those, but I’m satisfied with, she did come out a way better book because of that. I mean, people do wanna know, why are you telling me this story and what should I learn from it?

John Jantsch (07:14): Frankly, thank God you had that editor because there are a lot of editors that would’ve phone phoned that in and said, you know, send it on to line copy and you know, frankly that’s the editor’s job. You know, I had an editor on one of my first books that used to always say, you’re doing too much throat clearing here, . Which was basically his way of saying get to the point. Yeah. And I think that’s what a good editor actually can do. I mean, you know, you can find somebody to put the semicolons where they belong . So, so that’s awesome. You know what’s interesting is I listen, you talk about your struggle with that. You were defiantly I was gonna say self-reliant, but you know, you definitely are yourself. You wanna go your own path in some ways. Did that make you recoil against what you saw as the structure for a book?

Laura Belgray (07:59): Yes, it did. I mean, first of all, as I said, I set out, determined not to write the kind of book that I was supposed to write in the space, in the online space. Coming from a business background. I was supposed to write a copywriting book, a marketing book, a self-help book, something with bullet points at the end of each chapter or cyber or your next steps. And I was like, I am not doing that. I refuse. I want this to be, I was a little snobby about it. I was like, I want this to be a literary book. And yeah. So, and I kind of felt like the structure of a literary book is whatever I wanna make it, which is not true at all. So yes, but I was, I was defiant about structuring it the way you are supposed to. And I am glad that I had that, you know, this editor that I have who yeah told me you’re, you know, this needs to have str this needs to have wisdom to it, it needs to arc to some sort of meaning. And yeah,

John Jantsch (08:57): So, so one of the copywriters key tools is vulnerability. Mm-hmm. , some of the stories in this book would make me blush, were I to write them. So was that part hard?

Laura Belgray (09:09): No, that part was actually pretty easy. And it, you know, it could be because my, my father died in 2018 and I have a feeling that timing had something to do with me finally moving ahead on this book. There’s a lot in there that I would not want him to read a lot that confirms his suspicions back when I was in my twenties and living at home and staying out till four or all night. Like what? I we’re

John Jantsch (09:37): Not going, we’re not going into that chapter by the way.

Laura Belgray (09:39): , no. Chapter nine. So when I warned my mom not to read and she did , but it, yeah, so, so there was a little block around that for a while. He was alive. And I do, I didn’t think about it consciously until recently. I was like, yeah, that might’ve freed me up. And I do tend to, uh, I, I am drawn to Tmmi. I like sharing too much information. I am not private about a lot. There are a few things that I’m private about and my current life and there are things I wouldn’t reveal about my current life or my private life with my husband or anything like that. But revealing things about my past, I feel a little in a sense disembodied from that me, so that it’s almost like I’m writing about somebody else. Cuz it was a different person. Yeah. Different time, different person.

John Jantsch (10:29): Yeah. You talked numerous times about being a late bloomer, you know, from a career standpoint, I think that anybody who would look at your current body of work would say that you’re quite accomplished. So, you know, where’s the late bloomer come from? Is that just because you were saying I didn’t do what people expected?

Laura Belgray (10:51): I think that is part of it. I mean if, you know, if you read the book you might say, oh, like Laura was handed opportunities from early on, like just a year outta college, got this job and then that job and then that job. But I always felt like I was on a delay. Everybody was moving faster than me. Sure. My first year out of college everybody was out getting jobs, getting internships, getting, you know, working as paralegals making money. And I just, I didn’t want any of it. And I was waiting around to find a job that I really liked. And that’s been most of my career is saying like, no, I don’t wanna do that. I can’t do that because I don’t want to. I’m not very good at doing things I don’t want to . So jobs that, I mean, I, I think part of it is my resistance to corporate culture. I’ve never been that person who gets promoted every time they walk into a room. And it lasted all of six months in my one, nine to five job. And so I’ve never been that person who moves up and up in my career. I it very windy, a very windy path and we’re sideways and, um, looking for things that I actually want to do. And it takes a while to find that.

John Jantsch (12:05): And now a word from our sponsor. You know, this next company is almost as old as the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Since 2010, the hot has been fulfilling SEO for clients across the world. Today they wanna share with our listeners a 20% off promo code. Welcome 20 to use on any product from link building, blogs, infographics, and more. Head on over to the hot.com, create your free account today and use that code. Welcome 20 and tell ’em John sent you

(12:36): Are you sick and tired of wasting your precious time on tedious tasks like pulling reports, rewriting blog posts, and trying to personalize countless prospecting emails. Well say no more because I’ve got some new AI tools that are gonna blow your mind. Introducing HubSpot’s newest AI tools, content assistant and chat spot. Content assistant uses the power of open AI’s G P T three model to help you create content outlines, outreach, emails, and even webpage copy in just seconds. And in case that wasn’t enough, that created Chat Spott a conversational growth assistant that connects to your HubSpot CRM for unbeatable support with chat-based commands, you can manage contacts, run reports, and even ask for status updates. The easy to use CRM just got even easier. Head on over to hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence to get early access today to both content assistant and chats spott.

(13:46): Yeah, I think the adventure path is the way to go, which mm-hmm , you know, is not for everybody, but I think when you, many people looking back on their lives would say, yeah, that was the way to go. Let’s dive into a couple chapters to give people a flavor of what they’re going to find. As I already said, we’re gonna stay away from chapter nine, . I mean, you’ve already gotten me in trouble with the title of the book to begin with. So just cuz I’m such a goofy guy, how I met my husband.

Laura Belgray (14:13): How I met my husband. Well that’s a story of how I met my husband. But I

John Jantsch (14:19): Know now

Laura Belgray (14:19): I

John Jantsch (14:20): Wanna hear it. No, nothing gets named a chapter title without it being a significant story

Laura Belgray (14:26): . Exactly. Well I think I wrote about that because the way I met my husband defies all the common dating advice and wisdom of how you are supposed to meet the one. And I met him, like our relationship overlapped for both of us with terrible relationships that we shouldn’t have been in. And I think the common advice would be make room, you know, people talk about Marie coning your love life, getting rid of what doesn’t spark joy. Making room for the love to come in and getting rid of the clutter, which would be bad relationships with people who don’t serve you. Right. And yet I would say that it is Bec absolutely because I was in a terrible relationship that obsessed me. You know, a person who was married and cheating, cheating in all different ways and and a bit of a narcissist and a liar and all those things because I was so obsessed with him. I was not a clingy monster When I met this new person who I liked so much, I was actually able to be the aloof, not caring. Sure, write me back anytime. Sure you can cancel tonight. Uh, kind of person that I always wanted to be

John Jantsch (15:46): you also have a title chapter or chapter titled The Most Driven Person, you know, so that obviously speaks to your level of ambition somewhat

Laura Belgray (15:59): . Yes. It’s because I’m absolutely the most ambitious person, you know? No, it’s, it is the opposite of that. It is an intentional mislead. It is about two things. It is a, I am literally the most driven person, you know, because I don’t drive and so I’m the one who’s driven around and really driving is a metaphor for so many things. You know, be the, take the driver’s seat in your own life, take the wheel, be in charge, you do the steering. And I’ve always been content to lean back and nap in the passenger seat. And I’m a terrible driver and I’m also, I also just don’t come out in any of those personality tests as the driver. You know, there was a personality test that was going around at work and my boss took it and she’s like, I’m a double driver. I’m in the upper right of the upper right quadrant, which means that I’m a driver in every way. And I was like, I don’t know what, where I fall in that test, but I know it’s not double driver . I’m not a, I don’t consider myself a leader, I never wanted to manage a team of people. I don’t even like seating people at a dinner party telling anyone what to do. So that’s the essence of that chapter.

John Jantsch (17:15): You also talk about laziness the good, like the good kind and the bad kind. And I firmly agree with you. I think there are some awesome bad laziness. Yes, I do. Some people look at it as procrastination, you know, as a form of bad laz. And I actually think sometimes what you’re doing is letting things brew.

Laura Belgray (17:35): I agree. So yeah, I think that just like with cholesterol, there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good fat and bad fats like guacamole, you know, avocado is good fat. I think there’s good lazy and bad

John Jantsch (17:46): This week. This week they’ll,

Laura Belgray (17:48): It’ll be better. Yeah. This way. Yes, exactly. after I just consumed three bowls of it yesterday. . So I, I think that I would say that I have both an equal measure. I, I identify as an unapologetically lazy person and a lot of people say, oh you’re not lazy. Look at, you know, you accomplished things, you wrote a book and you did this, you did that. And I’d say that for one, the good kind of lazy is yeah, being able to relax. I don’t measure my self worth or locate my self worth in how hard I work. Yeah. In fact, for me it’s a little bit of a badge of shame maybe cuz I brand myself as lazy, but to be working too hard to be overworked, I am very comfortable lying around and doing nothing. And that’s my natural state. And also if my husband comes around with a vacuum, I’m like hard pressed to even lift my feet .

(18:39): And to me that’s good lazy because a lot of people, especially women, have a hard time not doing anything. They have a really hard time with blank space on our calendar, which is something I relish to the like, I love it when there’s nothing on my calendar. My favorite kind of day is blank. Yes. And so that’s the, that I think is the good lazy because people struggle with it. They struggle to like relax and be okay not doing something every moment. And then the bad lazy is I would say is what I call fear dressed in pajamas. It is resistance. Resistance to doing what you know you need to do. The fear of not doing a good enough job. That’s where the like the bad procrastinating comes from. Yeah. It’s like putting it off because you’re so afraid that you’re not gonna do it right or knock it out of the park and yeah, that stops, that has stopped me a lot in my life,

John Jantsch (19:33): You know, and that’s the kind that puts a lot of stress on you that you don’t realize. I think a lot of times, you know, there’s a line from the Scarlet letter when the protagonist, you know, is finally kind of released from all the guilt and shame that had been put on her and is she did not, she did not know the weight until she felt the freedom. And I think that’s the way a lot of that does that to us. It’s like we don’t realize how much this stuff is weighing us down until we’re like, oh yeah, you know, free of it and then you’re like, holy crap, that was, I’m much lighter. That was, you know, that was definitely weighing me down. Yes. So I wanna do one, one more chapter, how to be popular.

Laura Belgray (20:09): How to be popular. That was about the year that I switched schools. And this wasn’t the typical from, you know, public school to a posh private boarding school or something like that where it was that kind of obvious culture shock. It was from one private school to another private school. There was a culture shock. There were totally different places. And my, you know, old, my former private school that I was in for 11 years was like laid back progressive school where you could say, you know, where if you are handed back your test papers, you could just go around the room, say, what’d you get, what’d you get? You get, and then the new school was an all girls school and very traditional and a little up and competitive. Competitive. And you know, if you said, what’d you get? Person would like move their paper away from you and fold down the corner and cover it with their arm and be like, that’s none of your business.

(21:06): But it, so that chapter is mostly about me trying to fit in there and the contradictions of, you know, you’re supposed to look effortless and have the right shoes that are scuffed from years of, you know, salt air, corrosion on daddy’s yacht and be really chill. And it was a certain kind of preppy old money aesthetic there. And you know, that contradiction with, you know, you’ve gotta work hard and you’re not supposed to be seen working hard, which is just like in our current, you know, online business culture. You’re not, you’re supposed to be the picture of ease. And yet we still have people yelling at us to hustle. And there’s such a confusion between grinding and anti, anti cult, anti hussle culture and hustle culture and being in our, in my new school it was called Being a Grind. And you are not supposed to be a grind, but you were supposed to get good grades.

(22:06): But the, you know, the uh, punchline of that chapter is basically that I tried to, I really wanted to have shoes like everybody else. I knew I needed this right. Kind of beat up, broken in leather boat shoes. And I, my mom, I begged my mom to buy me a pair and she bought me a pair of Docksiders or Topsiders, I forget what brand. Yes. But they were yes berry and they were glaringly virginal fresh. So shiny leather , so shiny unblemished. And so I bought a wood file and scuffed them, hand scuffed them myself one afternoon after school. And then the result was that they looked insane. , in no way did I look like a preppy kid who, whose daddy had a boat

John Jantsch (22:56): . It looked like you’d just into the factory maybe.

Laura Belgray (22:59): Yes. I and, and then attacked by a Tiger

John Jantsch (23:03): . Well Laura, it was so great catching up with you again and having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. She wouldn’t tell people where they can connect with you and perhaps take, pick up a copy of Tough Titties.

Laura Belgray (23:15): Yes, please. Well you can connect with me @talkingshrimp.com. That’s my digital home and I’m mostly on Instagram as at Laura Belgray. So please do connect with me in either of those places. But you wanna get a copy of Tough Titties or several copies and then you will unlock more bonuses. I’m gonna actually have writing trainings and things like that to go with it, even though it’s not a copywriting book that is @toughtittiesbook.com and all the book sellers are represented there, all the ones that matter. So please come by and score a copy or several, they’re great as the set tough titties, you know, gotta get at least get two and fill in the form and you will get your bonuses.

John Jantsch (23:59): Awesome. Well, again, as I said, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you again one of these days out there on the road.

Laura Belgray (24:07): I would love that. Thank you so much for having me on.

John Jantsch (24:10): 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 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent, an episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Charles Conn. He’s the author or co-author of the bestselling book, Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything. And he’s got a new book coming called The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times. He’s also the co-founder of Monograph Capital, a life sciences venture firm in London in San Francisco, and was previously CEO of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. He’s the board chair of Patagonia and sits on the Nature Conservancy European Council. He was founding CEO at Ticketmaster City Search and was a partner at McKinsey and Company. So Charles, welcome to the show.

Charles Conn (01:43): It’s really good to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:45): You’ve been a busy man.

Charles Conn (01:47): I have been a busy man,

John Jantsch (01:49): . So I do wanna talk about your book, but I can’t pass over talking for a moment, if you will, about Patagonia. And I’d love to just talk a little bit about the, I know how un uh, maybe you have to remind people, but a lot of people certainly are familiar with the story, but how unprecedented and maybe how important for the environment, the current kind of shift in, what would we call it? Ownership has been,

Charles Conn (02:16): I’m, I lost you for a second there. I hope it’s not my internet here.

John Jantsch (02:22): So, so I had just teed up a question about the change in Patagonia, which I’m hopefully people have read. You might remind people of the scope of it, but just how unprecedented that changes and how important for the environment you think it’s been or will be.

Charles Conn (02:37): Yeah, look, I mean, it was a number of years in coming and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. We already have many people, you know, calling us and sending emails about how they can do something like this too. And as you know, Yvonne and his family gave away the entire company to fight the environmental crisis. But I, I do think it’s really worth saying that you don’t have to, you know, in order to do good, you don’t have to do something as bold as that. I like to think of the example of, for example, MasterCard. 9% of MasterCard shares are held by the MasterCard Foundation, which gives away, you know, billion dollars a year. So there’s a lot of good that people can do without doing something as extreme as what Patagonia did. We think it’s a wonderful example in some ways. Yvonne teed it up in 2018 when he changed the mission of the company from making the best gear, doing unnecessary, no unnecessary harm, and using capitalism to fight the environmental crisis, to we’re in business to save the home planet. And what, you know, what he and the family did September 14th last year, I think was the kind of the culmination of setting us that kind of a challenge as the mission of the company.

John Jantsch (03:46): Yeah. Well the company has had a long history of, you know, of social as a men, you know, environmental steward is stewardship, but as you mentioned, that was sort of unprecedented . So in the subtitle of your book, you used the term uncertain times. So I’ll just tee this up. Are we in particularly uncertain times?

Charles Conn (04:07): It feels like it. I mean, you know, when you look at all of human history, of course things change very little. And then if you really look at the last, you know, 75 or a hundred years, really within the lifetime of our parents, everything has changed. And then if you just look at the last two decades and you look at programmable biology, artificial, the impact of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, things are changing actually much faster still, even in the last decade. Things are changing faster than the previous decade. And I think what it means is all the frameworks that we were taught, the ways of thinking we were taught, you really need to set them aside and say, what are the right mindsets for approaching the world that we live in now?

John Jantsch (04:52): Yeah. And of course you could certainly make a case for the last three or four years, you know, acceleration happened even faster. And really, as somebody who’s written and writes about problem solving, I mean, wasn’t that basically like it or not an incredible environment to test problem solving? Yes,

Charles Conn (05:09): . Yeah. I mean, I, it’s funny. I think, you know, problem solving is now and you know, it’s been my life’s work. But in a world where, you know, the internet MO knows more than you could ever know, right? And there are more specialized people in every possible field and every type of influencer. What are the, what’s the one or two things that humans can actually do better than anything else? And I think the answer to that is problem solving in small groups. And I, you know, I don’t think there’s anything more, you know, essentially human than that.

John Jantsch (05:51): There’s a particular type of problem solving that I always find intriguing. There’s examples of it the last couple decades particularly, and that’s the, the business leader who is faced with solving a problem of their cash cow going away, right? The industry is changing in such a way that they are gonna have to like kill the, you know, let’s use another metaphor, the golden goose. And some choose to ignore it because hey, you know, I’ll be outta here in a while, , you know, and how do you address that? Put that problem that you don’t, in some ways you could say you don’t wanna solve.

Charles Conn (06:25): Yeah, well, you know, I mean, in many ways that’s what the book is about. You know, that you have sh Peter’s creative destruction, right? Which is the, which the Austrian economist said that’s what capitalism is about. And of course, you know, it’s the job of every company, including companies like Patagonia to either reinvent themselves or become part of the trash heap of, you know, past ideas that didn’t work right. And what the book, the new book, which is about problem solving under high uncertainty is about can you make that transition? Can your company or organization, cuz half of our examples are nonprofits, can you recreate yourself or not? That’s what it’s about.

John Jantsch (07:05): So, so there’s been a lot of, I mean a lot of people would agree with this idea that trying to be a perfectionist, you know, is a kind of a dead end that people have, I think given up on that idea. But have you taken it to another extreme that might be interpreted by using the word imperfections might be interpreted as like good enough?

Charles Conn (07:25): No, I mean, and, and of course, you know, the double meaning in imperfection is intended. Uh, you know, the, there is no, if you think about like linear programming or even chess where all the rules are actually known. And you know, that’s one of the reasons why machines are so good at it. That isn’t the world that we live in today. You know, when you and I were going through university strategy was about understanding industry structure and who the players are and thinking about the conduct of those players within the structure. Well, when the structure is blurry, you know, we have super competitors like an Apple or a Google or a Microsoft, and where things are changing so quickly that the person who disrupts your business is just as likely to come up from outside as inside, probably more. So that way of thinking about strategy as if it were a programmable game is completely wrong.

(08:19): You need to think about strategy as more of a dance. And that’s where this idea of imperfection comes in. So what you need to do is be curious. You need to gather data, you need to see things from multiple perspectives, including the perspective of people outside your industry. You shouldn’t be thinking about what your classic rival’s gonna do. You should be thinking about some rival you’ve never even thought of. And so you should anchor outside your own way of thinking about yourself and even find sources or solutions in, for example, you know, com competitive games like Kaggle where you use that in order to provide a new way of thinking about your own business. Right? So that’s imperfection

John Jantsch (09:01): It, it’s interesting though because as I listen to you described that, you know, I think a lot of people would talk about strategy as a science, and you are talking about strategy as an art. Maybe , you know, check off who was both a scientist and an artist said, the only difference is artists embrace uncertainty, . And I think that’s really where you’re headed, isn’t it? The uncertainty.

Charles Conn (09:20): And I wish, I wish I put that in the book. I mean, checkoff is one of my favorite authors, and I think that’s right. What we’re saying is that strategy is more like rugby than linear programming and more like an art than a science. And it’s about an orientation you take toward the future rather than trying to discern each corner, you know, like in a Tron game, right? Yeah,

John Jantsch (09:42): Right. . So, so you, like all good authors have a framework, I guess the six mindsets we might call them. And some of them I think are pretty obvious. I won’t have you unpack them all. I mean, pretty obvious where you’re going with them. But the one I really do want to hear about is Dragonfly Eye, just because it’s so interesting.

Charles Conn (10:01): . Yeah, so, so call it a framework if you like, but in some ways I’d like to think of it as an anti framework. Ah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:08): So you get, you, you’re the author, you get to .

Charles Conn (10:12): Well we, you know, I mean, you know, I went to business school and went to work at McKinsey and we were taught, right? Right. You know, Michael Porter structure conduct performance in McKinsey. And what all I’m saying is here’s a group of six things, you know, arrows you can put in your quiver. Yeah. Pull ’em out as you need ’em. Dragonfly eye is one we like a lot, and we use the analogy of a dragonfly, which has thousands of separate cells in their eyes and they collect information that’s much richer than the human eye can capture. We don’t know exactly how their dragonfly eye brains process information, but we do know that they can see far more spectrums of light and far more angles than we can. And we use that analogy to say, when you’re thinking about strategy, don’t just think about it from the perspective of yourself and your company, which is of course the very natural thing to do.

(11:05): Sure. Right. And you know, at a place like Patagonia, we’ve been going for 50 years. Of course you’re rooted in your own history. What we’re saying is step outside that, anchor outside that and say, force yourself to think about what does it look like from the perspective of one of your upstream suppliers or one of your downstream customers, or one of your existing rivals. Or perhaps think about it from the perspective of a potential rival. If you see the kind of strategic problems that you’re facing from a variety of perspectives, you’re much less likely to just drop into that rut that we’re all used to thinking about. Like, maybe we need to cut price, maybe we need to add another product color. I mean, that’s bullshit. That’s, you know, that’s the kind of old way of thinking. Maybe we need to blow ourselves up and think entirely differently. And of course, that’s what businesses find so difficult to do.

John Jantsch (12:00): Well, and I mean, I’ll give them a little bit of support. I mean be, because un unfortunately, sometimes what that requires is, and we’re gonna go, we’re gonna like get hit by our shareholders pretty hard for a while. I mean, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna have, you know, some real trouble explaining people why, you know, we see the future that they don’t. So That’s right. I mean, that’s probably what holds people back, right.

Charles Conn (12:22): Is, and, you know, and of course my, my friend who was, you know, my, my colleague in business school, clay Christensen, you know, wrote books and books about this. Yeah, yeah. You know, you can either choose to be the disruptor of yourself or you can let other people have a go at disrupting you. And it is difficult. And you face pressures from your shareholders, from your employees, from your mother who says, what are, you know, what are you thinking? But if you don’t do the job to rethink yourself. And it’s funny, cuz I was with Yvonne Melinda online j just on Friday, and Melinda made this point. She said, you know, we’ve been doing this since 1970, right? And every few years we reinvent what it means to be Patagonia, not the core ethic of serving outdoor athletes and doing it in a way that doesn’t damage the environment. But we rethink what it means to do those two things every few years. And if you don’t have that flexibility to do that, you end up being toast. Right. And especially in retail, think how many retailers are still around, right? When you were a kid, there was Montgomery War and Sears, where are they today?

John Jantsch (13:34): Kmart. Kmart,

Charles Conn (13:35): .

John Jantsch (13:36): Yeah.

Charles Conn (13:37): Kmart two. Kmart two. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, this is the challenge for all of us as the world gets faster and as technologies make it easier for other people to attack our business even when they didn’t grow up in our business. Right? That’s the, that’s what’s different, different about today.

John Jantsch (13:56): Now, a word from our sponsor, Hey, are you sick and tired of wasting your precious time on tedious tasks like pulling reports, rewriting blog posts, and trying to personalize countless prospecting emails will say no more because I’ve got some new AI tools that are gonna blow your mind. Introducing HubSpot’s newest AI tools, content assistant and chat spot. Content assistant uses the power of open AI’s G P T three model to help you create content outlines, outreach, emails, and even webpage copy in just seconds. And in case that wasn’t enough, they created chat spot, a conversational growth assistant that connects to your HubSpot CRM for unbeatable support with chat-based commands. You can manage contacts, run reports, and even ask for status updates. The easy to use CRM just got even easier. Head on over to hubspot.com/artificial intelligence to get early access today to both content assistant and chats spott.

(15:08): 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.

(15:55): So in a lot of ways, I mean, I think people would think about this idea that you’re explaining in maybe 10 year windows. Like where are we gonna have to be? And I mean, you’re really talking about realtime, right?

Charles Conn (16:05): , I’m talking about realtime. I’m talking about, you know, your planning horizon should be less than a year. Yeah. You, and you should be scanning the horizon for both opportunities and threats all the time. Think about the folks in who work in banks right now. I mean, what’s a bank gonna be in 10 years? Yeah. Who are the most interesting players in banking right now are not banks. Right? And look at players like Amazon. So in 2007, they had no position in consumer finance. Today they have a 24% share. Their payment system has a 24% share of transactions that are occurring in retail in the United States. That’s just a few years. They didn’t do it by acquiring a big consumer finance company or a bank. They did it by making small steps, investing in this little enterprise, hiring a team from this failed FinTech, you know, very small moves that were they, which they used to build up their capabilities and understand more, more concretely what was beginning to play out in consumer finance. They stepped themselves into a very strong position just as they had done in cloud computing and just as they’re doing again now in consumer healthcare. Right?

John Jantsch (17:25): Yeah. And there probably were failed bets along the way that didn’t work out, you know? But I think that’s the point you’re making, right? Is we have to be doing lots of events.

Charles Conn (17:32): Right? Many, the book starts with Amazon’s stepping in to consumer finance. And the four examples I give that they did from 2007 to 2015 were all failures. Yeah. They all looked like failures, but they weren’t failures. Each one of those was a learning step for Amazon. Each one of them helped build their assets and capabilities, helped build their team and the team skills and helped build the team’s understanding of the game field that was slowly or quickly unfolding.

John Jantsch (18:04): So for this realtime strategic problem solving leader of the future, , are there attributes that they either need to develop, embrace, or have that you think are going to serve them?

Charles Conn (18:17): Yeah. And you know, I’m gonna give you the most obvious of all, and it’s, and you’ll say it’s boring, but the very most important thing, because all of us humans are subject to incredible cognitive biases, his curiosity, right? And when you read, you know, Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, he tells us all the ways, you know, with our giant brains, we actually use that processing power just to convince ourselves that our initial thought about something is correct. Instead of using that awesome processing power to really think the starting point of real thinking is to be curious. Yeah. The second one we’ve discussed already, which is to see things from other perspectives before you jump in. The third thing you can do is conduct your own experiments rather than relying on other people’s data. Right? And that’s, you know, in the internet we’ve learned, let’s do AB testing or a B C D testing before we hone in on something and then let’s make small steps where we learn things, right?

John Jantsch (19:18): Yeah. I think validate, validating our existing point of view, sort of a survival mechanism, isn’t it, ? It

Charles Conn (19:23): Is. And you know, and of course when you were, when things would jump out of the bush and eat you Yeah. You know, that that kind of instinct to grab onto the first thought, flee, made sense. And in the world we live in today, it doesn’t make sense. It’s counter, counter counterintuitive and unhelpful.

John Jantsch (19:41): So I don’t think for, by the way, the, that your answer of curiosity was boring. I think it’s, I think it’s uh, I think it’s a superpower quite frankly for, you know, a lot of the, the most innovative people out there and it’s something that’s hard for some people. So what do you think about the idea of, I mean there are a lot of, I I can just hear some companies saying, well, we’re just a entrenched boring industry. We’re just cranking along, you know, what’s so, so curiosity has died, right? ? Yeah. So how do you go out and buy that? How do you acquire that? How do you, like, do you just bring people in that are not from your industry in any way, shape, or form to go? Why are you doing that?

Charles Conn (20:15): So first of all, I do think it’s a great idea to bring people in from outside, but I think you can reinvent yourself from inside too. And one, you know, so first of all, there’s internal processes you can do, you know, you can bring your team together more frequently. You can get rid of hierarchy in your company. You can push decisions down further into the organization. And when you do strategy sessions, you can make sure that the most senior people speak last, not first . Right? I love breaking teams into, I love breaking teams into two and having them contest each other. The other thing you can do is keep part of your external research budget to literally source ideas from outside. So let me give you an example. The Nature Conservancy, which is a nonprofit, wanted to build a system for detecting what kind of fish are caught at sea are protected and which ones are okay to keep.

(21:08): And it, they didn’t have that capability inside. So they used Kegel to actually create a contest for artificial intelligence engine that would recognize Phish using onboard cameras. Mm. They didn’t source that from internally, they sourced it from externally. And a group of boffins, they paid prizes $150,000 and that $150,000 created a whole new system for, for saving protected fish at sea so that those fish could be thrown back and tuna was the species they were looking at. So even a boring old organization can source some of its most leading ideas from outside and by using its, you know, frontline people much more effectively inside.

John Jantsch (21:52): Yeah, I th I I think there’s probably no question that’s where I think some of those crowdsourcing things have become Yeah. So useful is that there’s no question there’s people out there that have solved the problem. They didn’t know you had, you know, , I mean, they were just something, they were tinkering with ,

Charles Conn (22:06): Right. And they weren’t thinking about Phish when they were inventing this camera based shape recognition. Yeah. Right. And they loved it. They said, oh look, this is a fin . And so they u they used that, that computer vision in order to recognize the characteristics of different fish in a boat that was bouncing up and down and it worked.

John Jantsch (22:26): Yeah. So as you were answering that last question, I wrote down the word culture, because that’s really what you’re talking about in a lot of ways that’s what has to change, right?

Charles Conn (22:35): Yeah. And in the companies we think of as nimble Yeah. You know, they’re just as subject to the same human frailties that you and I are. Yeah. They build in a, they build in cultures that lead to constant questioning of what they’re doing. So he may not be everyone’s favorite person, but when Elon Rusk, Elon Musk is running things at SpaceX, he’s constantly asking impossible questions and it creates a culture of asking impossible questions. Right? He says, we need a flight computer. Everyone says, great. And he says, we need a flight computer for $10,000. And everyone says that’s impossible. And he says, make it happen.

John Jantsch (23:14): . Right?

Charles Conn (23:15): That kind of thinking that leads to, you know, what you have in that case, which is the cost per kilogram of launch is 93% less than it was at NASA before he started SpaceX. That’s nuts. , you only do that by throwing out the window, the playbook, right? Yeah. Of nasa. And so we’re gonna have a launch of this giant stainless steel rocket and what does he tell us? It’s gonna be entertaining because he does, cuz he doesn’t know if it’s gonna work. And a number of the previous launches have failed. And of course if we don’t put people or animals on those right, when you’re still experimenting, that’s experimentation and scale and that’s pretty cool.

John Jantsch (23:53): Yeah. Yeah. Well, Charles, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You want to tell people where, invite people, where they might find out more about your work and your latest book, how to Become an Imperfection.

Charles Conn (24:06): Sure. I mean, you can find that@theimperfections.org or bulletproof problem solving.com. And look, it isn’t, it isn’t really about the book, it’s really about this set of ideas. You know, in a time of, uh, fast moving change. We all need to be more mentally nimble and, you know, these are mindsets that’ll help us be that

John Jantsch (24:27): Awesome. Well, again, thanks so much for taking a few moments to stop by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Charles Conn (24:33): Don, it was a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (24:36): 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, where are you standing 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.