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 Janstsch. My guest today is Rob Levin. He co-founded Work Better Now in 2018 and currently serves as the chairman. He’s also the managing member of the Oasis Strategy Group and CEO of RSL Media. Previously, Rob was the founder and publisher of the New York Enterprise Report, a media company that serves small and mid-size businesses, having been nationally recognized for his small business leadership. Rob began his career as a “big six” CPA and held senior positions in several entrepreneurial companies. So Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Levin (01:35): Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:37): You know, you and I have known each other for at least a decade. Back when you were with a, as I mentioned, had the New York Enterprise report, but I did not know you were a cpa.

Rob Levin (01:45): Yeah, started my career my first four years and it was a great place to start a career. Big company was one of the big, at the time, big six account firms, and they did something, which is really interesting. They taught me how to work, right, how to communicate with clients, how to get stuff done, and how to work hard. It’s a great way to start a career, not to mention, you know, accounting’s one of the languages of business. So it’s a good background to have in my back pocket.

John Jantsch (02:10): Yeah, absolutely. I think that probably more businesses fail because of a lack of any knowledge there, or at least understanding there. Probably more so that, well, I don’t know, maybe marketing is up there pretty high too. ,

Rob Levin (02:21): Yeah, mark. Yeah, it’s gonna be Necky neck

John Jantsch (02:24): . Exactly. So, so we’re gonna talk about your current company work better now, and maybe really wanna spend a lot of time just talking about the fact that, I mean, everybody knows that, you know, getting people period, you know, right now is a challenge for some companies. But so, but talk about work better now, how, what it is, what it does, you know, how it’s what kind of its unique place in the market.

Rob Levin (02:46): Yeah, I’ll just give you a quick story because I think that’s the best way to describe what we do. And actually kind of how we started it evolved a little bit. So it started as many things in my life do, and it, it did in a bar with, with a friend of mine from college. And I was saying, I wanna start this company. I want, I want virtual assistance for every business owner. I believe every business owner should have an as an assistant. And my partner, Andrew Cohen, who’s also worked with small businesses, said, holy cow, you’re totally, you know, you’re totally right about that. And he said, I’m in. And I said, what do you mean you’re in? Anyway, we became partners and the idea again was we, based on my experience having assistance based in Latin America, incredible, incredibly talented, eager to work people.

(03:29): And of course you have a big cost of living difference in Latin America as you do in the States. So it’s affordable for just about everybody. And we launched the business and it was going very slowly, just basically referrals and stuff. And then once Covid hit the, the business started to explode. And the other thing that, and because people became more comfortable with re remote workers, and the other thing that happened at the same time is we saw some of our clients hiring 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, uh, and more of our people. And we started to take a look. And what happened is they would hire an assistant, realize that assistant had all of these other skills that they can use elsewhere in the company. Project management, customer service u I mean, 40 different roles now. So that we then pivoted from just being a virtual assistant company to providing remote professionals from Latin America for US and Canadian based, small and mid-sized businesses.

John Jantsch (04:21): Yeah, there’s a couple things you mentioned there that I want to talk about. The first, the idea that every executive or every business owner or every CEO should have an assistant. That’s something that, you know, a lot of, we talked about, you were in big corporate, you know, a lot, anybody that was at a C level had a several assistants, right? I mean, that was just a thing. And I think a lot of business owners don’t realize the drag of admin work that they’re doing. I mean, I heard somebody say, you have an assistant, it’s just you , right?

Rob Levin (04:53): Jack Deli says, if you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant.

John Jantsch (04:56): Yeah. Yeah. And I, and what I find is that, you know, we work with a lot of people, obviously with marketing in the area of marketing, and a lot of business owners can’t focus on the strategic work of marketing, you know, the day-to-day marketing because, you know, which is certainly an important aspect of market because they’re doing all this other stuff that probably shouldn’t be doing. And it’s almost like until they can get out of that, they can’t go to the important work. And so I think that certainly makes a case for this idea of everybody should have that level that they can delegate to. Don’t, shouldn’t, they,

Rob Levin (05:25): It’s, it’s a combination of a few things. First of all, you hit the nail on the head, you know this probably better than anybody, but you have to set aside time to think about the str strategy of your business, the product strategy, the service strategy. Even if you have a simple business, it’s, it’s something you really need to spend time on. And marketing is, in a way, there’s more opportunity than ever, but it’s also more challenging than ever cuz there’s so many different channels and what your message should be, and your customers buying habits, by the way, have changed a lot in the past 10 or 15 years as anybody who listens to podcast would know. You need to set aside time for that. And you can’t do that if you’re setting up your own meetings and rescheduling them cuz everything gets rescheduled, , and go, you know, checking your own email, dealing with, uh, all of these little things that somebody else can do. And by the way, let’s take a business owner. Here’s another way to think about it. Let’s take a business owner making, let’s just say $200,000 a year. So a successful business owner, right? You know, what is their hourly rate? If you do the math 2000 hours in a year, that’s a hundred dollars an hour. So the other way to look at it is you’re spending a hundred dollars an hour for an assistant. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:32): Right?

Rob Levin (06:32): Yeah. Not to mention you’re probably doing things you don’t enjoy doing or probably not good at doing.

John Jantsch (06:37): Yeah. Yeah. And just the disruptions too, I know in mind, I mean, I’m one of those people that if somebody sends me an email and asks me a question or needs something, you know, I’m gonna re, if I read it, it’s gonna be harsh for me to just say, no, . And what I found as, you know, I I am use, use an assistant who is in my inbox, is that they don’t have the same tug , you know? That’s right. It is very easy for them to say, no, you do not qualify, or No, we don’t do work, you know, for that rate or, you know, whatever it is, and I, they’re not

Rob Levin (07:11): Gonna respond as emotionally as we will Exactly. Because we’re people and we have these relationships,

John Jantsch (07:16): Right. I mean, or worse, you know, but I use that idea of a fee, you know, a lot of times people say, oh, can you just do it for this? And I’m, well, I want to help. Right. You know, but the assistant who has a rule that says, no, we don’t do work for this, doesn’t really have that . They’re not going to give away the farm. Right. And I think that’s an element that a lot of people underestimate. You mentioned the idea of, you know, COVID bringing, you know, people who’d never done virtual work, never done work for, you know, never met with a client this way. You know, all of a sudden we’re forced to, and that’s obviously done a lot of very positive things in that People I think realize, oh, I can get talent from anywhere, , I can get talent that is unique to this one very specific thing. I need and it doesn’t matter if they’re in my town or not. And that’s really opened a lot of possibilities for business owners, hasn’t it?

Rob Levin (08:06): Hu huge, huge. Whether you’re, you know, in one place in the, in, in the States, and then you’re hiring from another place in the states, which has been going on for some time. But now this, this notion also is now a lot more accessible to hire people from anywhere in the globe. Right. And you have incredible talent throughout the globe. Again, you have a big cost of living differential, but you know, a lot of people, a lot of my friends who are business owners, most of my friends are, have told me over the past few years how hard it is to hi, to hire people who are eager to work, who are very enthusiastic. It’s getting harder and harder to find that. Whereas around, around the globe, there are plenty of people that have the skills and the desire and the enthusiasm so that that whole world is now opened up to, to businesses. And by the way, big businesses have been doing this for years and years, right? Yeah. And now I think smaller businesses are learning that, hey, there’s a huge opportunity for me too. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:00): I think that’s actually something I’ve seen a lot, a lot of smaller businesses are embracing, I think what have long been big business practices, you know, the whole C-suite idea. I mean, we have a, you know, this idea of fractional CMO or fractional cfo, f you know, it’s really made itself to the small business who maybe 10 years ago thought, oh, I don’t have C-Suite, you know, positions, , I mean, they do . I just don’t have anybody filling them. Right. And I think they’re really embracing a myriad of those roles. Let’s talk a little bit about overseas talent. You’ve mentioned Latin America is where your folks are coming from. Do you find, I mean, you mentioned some of the, the obvious things, cost of living is different, so it, a great opportunity for them would be different than a great opportunity for somebody say in the States. Do you find that there is a difference in work ethic in, you know, culturally and in some fashion that exists in Latin America that maybe doesn’t exist everywhere?

Rob Levin (09:54): Well, we decided to focus in on Latin America for a few reasons. First, starting with my experience. I’ve had an assistant from Latin America for the past 10 years. Actually, my assistant for eight years is now the general manager work better now. And not only did I have that experience, but I referred a lot of other people over to, to Latin American talent. This goes back to 2014 and all the way until we started and we were able to provide that service. What we found was very enthusiastic workforce, very talented, willing to learn, willing to find the hours. But then there were some other things too, like cultural similarities. Certainly as you compare us to other parts of the world, it compare Latin America to other parts of the world and also and donor. This can’t be underestimated similar time zones as us in the states, right?

(10:40): And that’s really important because either if you’re working with somebody, let’s say in Asia, then either they’re working while you’re sleeping in vice versa, which can work by the way for some situations. Or they are working your business hours, which means they are working in the middle of the night, which anybody who knows anything about circadian, the rhythms is not a good thing for some, for somebody’s health, not something that we wanted to promote. So for all of those reasons, as well as fantastic English skills mm-hmm. , we focused in on Latinamerican. We’re now, we now hired from 19 different countries throughout the region.

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(12:51): So I want to just throw this out there. I know the answer to this, but I want to hear you address it because I’m sure you’ve been asked this question before. You know, lot, sometimes when people talk about offshore or you know, hiring people from other countries, there’s an element of exploitation even to it. I mean, it’s like, this is the only job they can get so we can pay them $5 an hour, right? I, I want you to talk a little bit about what you’ve seen is actually the opportunity , you know, as opposed to exploitation.

Rob Levin (13:17): Yeah. So first of all, our particular approach is we wanna make sure that our people are well paid, they’re paid considerably more than what they can make. But more importantly, when they, what you’ll hear from a lot of the people that, that work for our clients, which are going as well as our talent force, by the way, other than my partner and I, and a few salespeople, our entire companies run, um, out of Latin America. So what you’re gonna hear from them is, the opportunities that I get locally are, I don’t really like the culture. I’m not doing work that, that, that is, is interesting or exciting or I’m not learning and I’m certainly not making a as much money. So one of the reasons why I said to somebody literally today at lunch, that this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done, and I had a media company serving business owners that was pretty cool too, is because I’m just, I, I’m hearing from both sides about how amazing this is. I’m hearing from our clients, thank you, this has changed, my business has changed my life. Another thing I heard today at lunch from a friend and a client, and then I’m, we’re hearing from the talent that I’m doing meaningful work, I’m appreciated, I’m making more money, I’m able to buy that house that I couldn’t buy. So it, like I said, John, it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:28): Yeah. So, so I know that I’ve talked to business owners that because this idea of every business owner needs executive, I mean, that’s been around for an executive assistant that’s been around for a long time. I think a lot that that advice has been given by many people. But I also know a lot of people that tried it and failed . It’s like, I just, I couldn’t work with ’em or I didn’t wanna give up my email or, you know, so what have you found the people that, let’s focus on executive assistant for the moment, the people that have successfully engaged and really embraced this idea of an executive assistant freed up 20 hours a week of their time. You know, what have they, have there been some things that they’ve done, some best practices or mindset even, you know, maybe that it requires,

Rob Levin (15:10): It’s you, you hit the nail on the head. It starts with mindset. It starts by saying, even if I can do these things well, I know that I’m not best served and I’m not serving my company very well if I continue to do these things because I’m not doing all of those other things that we spoke about earlier. It’s a mindset. It took me a long time to get there too, by the way. Yeah. Be between when I first considered an assistant and when I hired one was about 18 months or so. And of course you immediately, once you start doing it, you’re like, I wish I started 10 years ago. But so it starts with mindset, knowing I don’t have to and I’m not going to, and I don’t want to do everything because I know my time is spent, it should be spent in other places.

(15:48): And then as far as as tactically, it’s, you know, it’s as simple as once you know that there are other things you can be doing, the next thing to figure out is what can come off my list? And to build that list, to at least start to build that list before you hire somebody, right? Right. It’s calendar management. If anybody has calls or meetings, they know that it takes about 25 minutes to schedule a meeting, at least a back and forth. And then of course that meeting will probably get rescheduled. That’s another 25 minutes. That’s an, that’s almost an hour for every meeting that you’re having. That alone is crazy. Some people are into having their emails scanned and addressed, addressed by their assistant. Like, my accountant has turned his inbox from 600 to 50 a day. But some people like me, I don’t need that. I, my email is very much under control. I don’t need that. But then there are so many other things that can be done. Like all of those bills that are not on auto pay, have them pay it to, by the way, personal things like scheduling medical appointments for you or your family travel plans. I can go on and on. Auto, auto

John Jantsch (16:48): Credit card, auto credit card statements, that’s one that, you know, every month we’re like, holy

Rob Levin (16:52): Crap, credit card statements, expense reports. I mean, there’s probably a list of 150 things, right? But you just start creating your own. Then when you do hire the assistant, right, you at least have a starting point. And then here’s another trick. First of all, yet, you do have to let go. But what I did is I said, because I know how important processes are, but I don’t want to create ’em. I mean, I, that would just drive me bonkers, right? Like a lot of business owners. So I just said, look, every time you’re gonna do something and I’m gonna show you how to do it, document it. Number one, you can go back to it. Number two, if you’re out and I need to have somebody cover for you, I can just give them a manual. So it’s really just get, show them literally once or twice how to do certain things.

(17:35): Tell ’em what to, what is the outcomes that you’re expecting? And you hire somebody sharp, they’re gonna figure it out. And before you know it, what’s interesting that happens is when I started, and this happens to many people, I only had 10 hours a week of stuff for them to do 30, 30. And I was like, wow, does this really make sense? 30 days later they have more than they, you know, more things to do than they have time in the day and things are carrying over and they’re working, you know, 40 hours a week nonstop, getting things done, taking things off your plate because you’re feeling more comfortable giving to them. You’re realizing, wow, you know what, they can do this, they can do that. So it’s a combination of mindset all the way to tactics to really painting a picture to your assistant, this is what success looks like by us working together. I don’t have to deal with these things. They just get done.

John Jantsch (18:23): And I think to your point, and, and, uh, I’ve probably talked about it before in, in other, uh, environments, but you know, we have several work better now, folks on our team. And one of the things that, you know, we noticed right off the bat was certain, highly educated. So, you know, clearly could, could handle probably more than we were initially asking. And that’s what we’ve really, that’s been the mindset that we’ve taken is, okay, what else can they do? What else can they do? And so, you know, my assistant who came in, you know, essentially to do some of the administrative stuff is really sharp guy. He’s editing our podcast now. He is, you know, putting together our, you know, weekly newsletter. So this is my wife, this is the only call that rings on my phone. But putting together our newsletter, I mean, so, you know, just, I’m excited to see how far we could take it. And that’s really what we have found. And I think once you start then stacking some of these things up, you know, all of a sudden the return on investment is ridiculous,

Rob Levin (19:21): and it’s big first because you’re getting great people. And then it happens to be at a rate. It’s, it, I don’t have a problem telling your, your listeners that it’s $2,100 a month for a full-time and dedicated assistant. When you add that in, it’s just, it becomes a no-brainer.

John Jantsch (19:35): Yep. We’re actually, you know, where there’s a lot of business owners that I firmly believe we could help more with their marketing if they would get some of this, have a marketing assistant. And so we’re actually working on placing, you know, marketing assistance with clients who we can then do strategic work for, but we can also make sure that they’re getting a ton of output on a lot of the stuff that’s just not getting done, frankly, by anybody currently.

Rob Levin (20:00): Yeah, yeah. What we’re helping, what, and again, our clients told us this, that they found that, you know, wow, these people are so good. I’m taking projects and things that I need to do that have been on the shelf. They’ve been sitting there for a while and I can now make them happen. It’s like I said, it’s just we’re having a lot of fun. And then of course, from my perspective, you and I have known each other, I think it’s closer to 15, 16 years and I’ve been listening to your podcast. I’ve, I read Duct Tape Marketing way back in the in the day. And to have someone like you say, you know, not only that you’re using our services, but then referring us out, I mean, does, it doesn’t get any better than that. John

John Jantsch (20:38): . So Rob, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna invite people where they can find out more about work better now and maybe connect with you even.

Rob Levin (20:47): Yeah. Work, work better now.com, find out all about us, hear what our clients have to say, and, uh, can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn. Rob Levin, work better now.

John Jantsch (20:57): All right, Rob, again, it was great catching up with you and I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Rob Levin (21:04): Looking forward to it, John. Thanks.

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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. My guest today is Joey Coleman. Joey helps companies keep their customers and we’re gonna talk about employees as well. Today. He’s a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Never Lose a Customer Again, an award-winning speaker and works with organizations around the world, from small startups to major brands. His first 100 days Methodology fuels the remarkable experiences as clients deliver and dramatically improves their profits. Today we’re gonna talk about Never Lose An Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention. So Joey, welcome back to the show.

Joey Coleman (01:36): John, thank you so much for having me back. Big fan of the show, longtime listener, excited when I can be a guest. So, so appreciate that. And thanks to everybody who’s listening in as well, looking forward to dive into the conversation.

John Jantsch (01:47): So I’m tempted to actually suggest that you could have just turned in the same manuscript and changed the title because really employees are probably our first customers, right

Joey Coleman (01:58): John? It’s so true. And in fact this is maybe a reveal that I shouldn’t be making publicly, but when I went to put together the first draft, I took the manuscript from my first book, I did a find and replace for every time I said customer, I changed it to employee. I’m not kidding you. Yeah, yeah. And that was the first draft of the book in the sense of do all the principles and all the concepts align. And to your point, they absolutely did. Now, after that, I erased the case studies from the first book and replaced them with new case studies that were more employee focused. But yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s the same story in a different direction.

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so let’s start a little bit with the stats, because I know that you’re a researcher when you write, everybody knows this, but let’s just make the pain real for them. You know, what’s the real cost of turnover? Employee turnover?

Joey Coleman (02:46): You know, it’s staggering, John, and it really depends on whether you look at the cost of what it takes to rehire someone, the cost of what it takes to get them up to speed, the cost of loss, productivity. But when you factor in all different ways that someone might measure the cost of losing an employee and having to find a new one, all the research combined shows that it’s somewhere between two and four x the annual salary of the employee you’re trying to replace. So if you’re looking for a hundred thousand dollars more senior member of your team, imagine three to $400,000 in loss. While you’re going through that process of the turnover. It’s also important to recognize that for more entry level members of your team or maybe frontline members of your team, you’re not only losing the economic cost, but there you have an even more significant morale cost. Yes. When you have four or five salespeople on the team and you lose one of ’em, the other remaining four turn around and say, well, what did that person know that I don’t know, why are they leaving?

John Jantsch (03:51): What’s wrong with me? What’s

Joey Coleman (03:52): Wrong with me? Why am I saying here? So there’s this whole, you know, non-monetary aspect of loss that occurs with employee turnover too.

John Jantsch (04:01): So, so you know, when people talk about like, we’ve gone through this crazy buying and selling homes, you know, it’s like a buyer’s market, a seller’s market. I mean, we’re kind of in an employee’s market right now, aren’t we?

Joey Coleman (04:13): We really are. And John, I would posit that we’re gonna be in that market for the foreseeable future. And here’s why. There were a lot of tragic and a lot of fascinating and a lot of interesting things that came out of Covid. But I think the biggest thing in the employer context that came outta Covid is employers globally learned that they could have their people work from home cuz they had to, and the employees globally learned that they could work from home because they had to. Yeah. What this did is it created an environment where maybe 40 years ago, 50 years ago, chances were better than not, your employer had their headquarters somewhere within 30 miles of your house. Now it’s the case that if your employer is within 30 miles of your house, I know two things about you. Number one, you probably have a very specific job.

(05:06): E i e, you have a job that requires manual involvement with the responsibilities you have. Mm-hmm. , or you and your employer have not realized that there are markets beyond 30 miles from here that might be willing to pay you more, do other things with you, give you more opportunities, et cetera. The last thing I’ll say on this, it’s the number of phone calls I have fielded in the last six months from clients saying to me, Joey, our best talent is being poached by companies outside the United States who are hiring employees. To get a beachhead or get a footprint right in the US has been staggering. And I think that’s only gonna increase in the future.

John Jantsch (05:47): So let’s talk, you know, a lot of marketers talk about this idea of the customer journey. I’ve, I talk a lot about the customer journey and the last year or two years people have been saying, can you actually change that a little bit to talk about the employee journey? And I think that, you know, when I look at it, my customer journey is no like trust, try, buy, repeat and refer. And I’m just like, yeah, no, like trust, try, hire, retain, , you know, and refer, I mean it’s like, it kind of works. So absolutely what I see is a lot of companies, you know, freaking out saying, we gotta find new talent, we gotta find new talent, right? And it’s like, marketers, we gotta run an ad so we can sell more. And really this whole idea of having a great customer or employee experience so that they certainly stay but also become, you know, loyalists to, to bring in other folks. H how have you kind of structure, I know you talk about the journey as well. How have you structured that thinking throughout this book?

Joey Coleman (06:40): Yeah, John, I’m a big fan of the, the duct tape path, if you will, of the customer. And I have a slightly similar, slightly different path that I outlined in my first book about the customer journey. I think of the employee journey as follows. It’s eight key phases and I’ll go through them real quick and give you an overview. The first phase is the assess phase. This is when a prospective employee is deciding whether or not they wanna work for you. So they’re checking out your job listings, they’re on your website, they might be talking to employees that you have to see what it’s like to work there. They’re going through your interview and hiring process. We then come to the accept phase. The accept phase has two key components. We make an offer of employment and the prospective employee accepts our offer. We then go to the third phase, the affirm phase.

(07:28): Now I imagine everyone listening has heard of the phrase buyer’s remorse, . I’ve coined a phrase, new hires, remorse. Because every new hire begins to doubt the decision they just made to accept your job offer. And what are we doing to address that? We then come to the activate phase, phase four, this is the first day on the job. What does that first day look like? What are we doing to really energize it to make it a memorable moment in their career journey? We then come to the acclimate phase. The acclimate phase is when this new hire is getting used to your way of doing business. This can last weeks, maybe even months. As they get up to speed, they learn the job, they figure out your roles, your ways you’re figuring out as the employer about them. We then come to phase six, the accomplish phase when the employee achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to do business with you.

(08:16): Every employee who accepts a job offer has a vision of what their future at their organization’s gonna be. Whether that’s an increase in title, an increase in salary, a promotion, something like that. So what have they accomplished? We then come to phase seven, the adopt phase where they become loyal to you and only you, they’re committed. They’re not gonna answer the other recruiter or head hunter calls. And last but not least, the advocate phase where they become a raving fan for your organization. This includes writing reviews on Glassdoor and sites like that, as well as recruiting people to fill other open positions you have in your organization. So if we do it right, it’s very similar to a customer journey going through these emotional phases of the employee rollercoaster.

John Jantsch (08:58): Well, and as in a good customer journey, there are intentional actions taken by, you know, the organization to move people through those stages.

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(11:05): So your 100 days framework shows up again of course in in this book. So talk a little bit about some of those intentional actions that companies can or should take to make like that first day, you know, you don’t just show up and go Yeah, you know, just follow this person around and you know. Right. , so, so what are some of your kind of fun things we’re gonna encounter as actual intentional actions?

Joey Coleman (11:29): Well, two thoughts to that, John. Number one, you mentioned kind of this first a hundred days methodology. All the research shows that the first a hundred days of the employee journey are the most important time period in the entire relationship. This is where the foundation is laid. This is where we really get things off to a good start. And what was staggering to me is that on average, across all industries, about 40%, 40 to 45% of new quit before the 100 day anniversary. Yeah. So stop and think about all this time and effort we made recruiting and interviewing and making an offer and negotiating. Almost half the people are leaving before they’ve been there three months. This is devastating not only to businesses operationally, but in terms of emotionally in their morale. So what can we do to make that experience remarkable? Well, to your point, and you hit it right on the head that day one experience, their first day on the job is really important.

(12:23): What happens in most organizations is that it’s an afterthought. Oh, we’re not exactly sure when they’re showing up. Oh, we need to do some HR stuff, fill out some paperwork. Oh, you better watch this training video from the seventies about sexual harassment and discrimination. Not to say those aren’t important things, but we’re not, we’re opening from a place of negative, we’re opening from a place of scarcity. As opposed to saying, what would it be like if we thought about what’s actually gonna happen at the end of the day, at the end of the first day on the job, your new employee is gonna get in their vehicle or they’re gonna get on public transportation, or they’re gonna start walking home if they have roommates when they get home. Whether that’s a spouse, children, a significant other, whoever it may be. The first thing that somebody asks when they walk in the door is, how is the first day on the chops ?

(13:13): That’s gonna be the first que, because they already know it’s the first day on the job and if they live by themself, they’re probably calling mom and dad or a friend or to tell them about the first day on the job. If nothing else, everybody who’s listening, I would ask you this. How is a new employee gonna answer that question based on what your typical first day looks like? Are they gonna be raving about how welcome they felt? Or are they gonna be raving about what a great experience they had, the new people they met, the work they got to do? Or are they gonna say, well, you know, I actually spent the first half of the day in a boardroom watching old videos and filling out paperwork. And then I went to lunch with somebody who had, seemed like they didn’t really even know they were gonna take me to lunch, but was excited to be able to put it on the company expense account. Then it came back in the afternoon to find out that I actually don’t have a desk with a computer set up cuz it wasn’t ready. I don’t really have my phone. I was supposed to have business cards. They said, I’ll have those in three weeks. And I basically got told to just look through some of our marketing materials and I’d meet with my actual manager tomorrow.

John Jantsch (14:10): , you know what, you just,

Joey Coleman (14:13): There’s a reason why that hypothetical works. It’s because we’ve lived it. Yeah. We’ve lived

John Jantsch (14:17): It. Yeah. So, so you know, well, as I heard you describing that, one of the things I encountered is that the problem with is it’s no one’s job, right? It’s like this person came along and they’re actually kind of like a nuisance because I’ve like already got a full plate . Right? And I think that’s really it, isn’t it,

Joey Coleman (14:37): John? A hundred percent. Two thoughts on that. Number one, in many organizations there’s someone who has the job of recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, making the offer, whether that’s a head of HR or a talent development person, et cetera. Then invariably we have someone who eventually that person is gonna report to a manager, a boss, a direct rep report, you know, a director of that kind of thing. The gap we have is in the middle. Yeah. The gap we have is the handoff from the recruiter to the manager. And most managers, I read that some fascinating research about a week ago. Most managers, the first time they get any type of managerial training happens at the age of 46

John Jantsch (15:20): .

Joey Coleman (15:21): Now stop and think about how many managers there are under the age of 46. Right? Do we have to wait a decade, a month, you know, years to get to any type of training. So I agree with you, the, if there was one thing that people took away from my book, it would be my hope that they find someone in their organization to be responsible for taking a new employee from the first time they hear about the business until they’re up and running a hundred days later. If there was one person that was responsible for that whole journey, our retention numbers would go through the roof.

John Jantsch (15:54): Yeah. And it’s not com it’s not a compliance act is it? ? No,

Joey Coleman (15:58): Exactly. No, it’s an emotional connection. How do we create personal relationships with the people that we’re bringing into our organization?

John Jantsch (16:06): Well, and it’s kind of like the restaurant, you know, when you go in there and somebody’s birthday and like they show up and instead of just your server, like every, all the servers come over and sing Happy Birthday. And it’s like that’s, you know, making that kind of party is, it just has become part of the culture. And so since I used the C word, but , you know, how do organizations who read this book go, yeah, we’re gonna retain our people now by, you know, changing everything. Well, the first a hundred days were a long time ago. You know, and it’s like how, you know, how do you put more fun in, put the experience in? I mean, how do you do that after the ship’s kind of already sailed?

Joey Coleman (16:47): Yeah. I think it’s never too late. Right. To make the experiences you’re creating better. And I totally appreciate and empathize with the fact, John, that many of the people that might be thinking, oh, this is something we need to pay attention to, already have team members that are well past the a hundred days. Exactly. So what can you do? I think you can do a couple things. Number one, I think you can acknowledge the positive and the negative aspects of your existing culture. What’s great about your culture, what does everybody know needs improvement. There isn’t an organization on the planet that couldn’t enhance their culture, couldn’t improve it in some way. So I think there’s always possibilities to do that. Number two, how can we connect with our people on a more personal and emotional level? If there was one question that I would hope people would ponder, it’s this, what would it take for us to care as much about what happens between 5:00 PM and 9:00 AM as we do about what happens between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Yeah. What’s going on in your employee’s lives after they leave the office, after they log off?

John Jantsch (17:53): Let me push back just a little bit. I, one a hundred percent agree with you, but I can also hear some listeners out there going, well that’s none of my business. You know, , I don’t want ’em to, you know, care about. That’s when they go home.

Joey Coleman (18:07): Totally. Well, here’s the thing, John, if I made the phrase you used is, well that’s none of my business

John Jantsch (18:13): .

Joey Coleman (18:14): I get it . But it is their business and it is their life. And that’s the point I’m trying to make. Yeah. When we recognize that we have human beings that work for us who have lives outside of the office, outside of the work they do for us, we’re better able to show up with empathy. We’re better able to show up emotionally to connect to them. Now, I’m not saying that you wanna say to all of your employees, Hey, make sure you send me an email and tell me everything you’re gonna do tonight between 10:00 PM and midnight. No, that is not at all what I’m talking about. But what I am talking about is the opportunity that so many employers miss to recognize that we expect the very best version of our employees during the workday without taking into any consideration what’s going on outside of the workday for them.

(18:58): Do they have a child that’s sick or are they struggling with childcare? Do they have a parent that’s aging that they’re trying to navigate? Do they have something going on in their personal life? I’m not saying you wanna pry into those things. Yep. But you do wanna create the space in your culture for those type of conversations to happen. And there’s a whole aspect of the book where we talk about, you know, how do we recognize milestones like births, marriages, deaths, divorces, all the things that are going on in our employees personal lives that very well we know impact their professional lives. But if we pretend like they’re not happening, that doesn’t build any type of rapport with our team.

John Jantsch (19:35): Well, and I think, you know, some would suggest that work for many is just a, you know, a means to an end. Right? And that that, you know, they’re, if we can activate the other things they’re passionate about, then the work becomes more important to achieving what they’re trying to achieve.

Joey Coleman (19:51): 100%. And I think you and I, John have both been around the block enough to know that if you’ve got employees where work is a means to an end, the work isn’t gonna be that great.

John Jantsch (20:01): Yeah.

Joey Coleman (20:02): , it just is. And that’s not a criticism against somebody who is like, Hey, I’m just there to earn my paycheck, but you’re not gonna be attracting the kind of talent and producing the kind of results then if you had an employee who was bought into your mission, bought into your vision, bought into your culture and what you’re trying to accomplish.

John Jantsch (20:20): So the term employer branding is kind of bantered around quite a bit in marketing circles these days with the idea of not only creating this great culture, this great place to work, but that becomes a huge aspect of your messaging, of your positioning that you know, who would wanna buy from a company that was a great place to work? , right? So Exactly. You know how, but obviously people can pay lip service to stuff like that too. So, you know, how do you, how do you take that got this great culture that you’ve built, this great experience and make sure that people are, people who are your customers are experiencing that.

Joey Coleman (20:55): You know, it’s interesting, John, one of my favorite things to do when I’m trying to evaluate what a company’s gonna be like to do business with or maybe to work at or anything like that is I go to the About Us page on their website, and I know you do a lot of research around websites and I’m sure familiar with the same stats I am. That the About Us page as a general rule is the most visited page of any organization’s website. It’s usually number two right on, on their site. But it’s in the top two regard. Sometimes some organizations, it’s number one, it’s always in the top two. What I always like to do, John, is when I go to the About Us page for a company, can I see a photograph of every employee they have? Can I see a bio in a description on every employee? Not only what they do for their work, but what their interests are, their passions? Do they have a pet? Where do they live? Those type of things. To me, that’s how you take aspects of the uniqueness of your organization, your people, and showcase it to the world. Now, because I can also imagine the pushback of some employees saying, well, I don’t want my dog’s name on the website, , have you ever met a dog owner? Most dog owners wanna talk about their dog all day long.

John Jantsch (22:03): Okay. So the practical reality is most of them will be pictured with their dog.

Joey Coleman (22:07): Exactly. And we’ll love to do that. And if you’ve got somebody who doesn’t want their picture on the website, that’s fine. Maybe we can do a caricature, maybe we can include the logo. Maybe we can at least include two or three things, their favorite book, their favorite movie, something that lets the outside world know we have humans that work at our company and we celebrate them for their humanity, not their productivity.

John Jantsch (22:31): Yeah. So Joey, we’ve run Outta time. I appreciate you coming by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I, you know, listeners out there, if you have anything to do with having speakers come talk about this topic, Joey on, on top of writing Incredible books is an amazing, entertaining and you know, wonderful speaker as well. So, you know, keep that in mind. Joey. Where would you invite people to, I know the book will be available everywhere, but uh, to connect with you.

Joey Coleman (22:56): Oh, John, thanks so much, first of all, for those kind words about the speaking, I appreciate it. I do love it. The best place to find information about this, the book is called Never Lose an Employee Again, as you mentioned, it’s available wherever books are sold, both as a hardcover, an ebook, and an audiobook that I narrate. So whatever version you like to consume content, it’s available. Best place to find me is at my website, joeycoleman.com. That’s j o e y, like a baby kangaroo or a five-year-old, you know, Coleman, c o l e m a n, like the Camping Equipment, but no relation, joeycoleman.com. You’ll find information about the book, you’ll find extra resources. One cool thing we did for the book, John, is there’s an opportunity to access the vault and in the vault are videos and templates and all kinds of information to help people take the ideas and the tactics and the techniques in the book and actually apply them as part of their business. And you can access that all at the website, joeycoleman.com.

John Jantsch (23:49): Awesome. Well, Joey, again, thanks for taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Hopefully we’ll see you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Joey Coleman (23:56): That sounds good. Thanks John, appreciate it. And thanks to everybody for listening in.

John Jantsch (24:00): 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, 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 Mike Rhodes. With over two decades in the digital marketing industry, he established his award-winning Melbourne-based digital agency, WebSavvy back in 2006, with the purpose of helping small businesses grow. The agency is a Google Premier partner and only one of a handful of Australian agencies to be part of Google’s international growth program. Mike also co-authored The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads. Now in its sixth edition. Google keeps changing things, gotta keep updating the book, the world’s best-selling book on Google ads with over 130,000 copies sold to date. So Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Rhodes (01:47): John. Absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:50): So, so Google’s really essentially kept you in business, haven’t they? Just by making changes. They’ve kept us all in business, haven’t they? Like every time they changed something we, you know, we’ve become more important to the world out there, don’t we?

Mike Rhodes (02:01): I hitched my wagon to the right ride way back when. Yeah. I didn’t choose Yahoo and Overture. So

John Jantsch (02:07): I was gonna say that the ultimate guide to Overcharges would not have sold as many kids. Oh, quite as

Mike Rhodes (02:12): Good. That one. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:14): So this is a really big question.

Mike Rhodes (02:17): Okay,

John Jantsch (02:17): Maybe I’ll say, maybe I’ll boil it down to like the last two years, rather than saying, you know, the 20 some years you’ve been doing this, what, what in the last couple years have you seen are the biggest changes? Let’s just throw it out. Digital marketing. You can go anywhere you want with that.

Mike Rhodes (02:30): Oh boy. Okay. So on the Google side at least they are continuing this sort of march towards the ultimate black box. I think the way Google would love it is give us your credit card and maybe a feed out of your accounting system on the other side, and we’ll just do everything in the middle and we’ll figure it

John Jantsch (02:49): All out. Yeah, you just stand over there and never leave. Right.

Mike Rhodes (02:52): Little humans out the way, please. We’ve got this, we’ll just spend your money for you. Which kind of sounds ridiculous, but we’re kind of heading in that direction almost a couple of years ago that was sort of another big change in this direction. Google launched this thing called Performance Max, which is the latest in this sort of black box. If you’re cynical, you might call it Inventory Max. It’s a way of Google selling a lot of inventory your ad will appear on. Yeah, basically all over Google. Seven different channels and Facebook have since come out with their sort of version of this and marketers are a little bit upset. But you know, we just, we crack on. We don’t really miss control. We, none of us want to go back to fiddling around with bids three days a week. But we do miss the ability to have insights.

(03:38): And so the more and more we head down this road towards the platform being a black box, I see two huge changes for marketers. My mental model is creative platform data and as the importance of platform in the middle starts to shrink, the importance of creative and data. Yeah. Rise massively. Businesses really only care about creative a lot of the time. We as marketers understand that data is incredibly important because we are marketing first to the machine. Because if we can’t convince the machine to show our ad, you know, the human never gets to see it. So yeah, data is so, so important and that obviously has led into this sort of AI world War now, which I’m sure we’ll talk about as well.

John Jantsch (04:21): Well, nobody else is talking about it, so we might as well, right. . .

Mike Rhodes (04:25): Yeah, that I haven’t seen anything about it on LinkedIn recently.

John Jantsch (04:27): Yeah. Yeah. I caught you right J as you were getting ready, taking a drink there you about spit it out, . All right, so let’s dive right into, you mentioned creative. You know, that’s certainly an area where AI is changing advertising. I, you know, I know from a testing standpoint it’s pretty easy to spin up 200 ads now or 200 headlines now using ai. There’s actually even some tools, especially as we go to the next generation of AI that’ll produce videos and produce, you know, images or full, you know, on ad creative. So what do you see as kind of the near term future of using AI and advertising?

Mike Rhodes (05:00): That’s crazy, isn’t it? I remember standing on stage in San Diego about five, six years ago. I was explaining how AI works cause I got into it really early, kind of ran away screaming thinking, businesses aren’t really ready for this. Everyone needs to focus on automation. And I remember saying bidding. Well that’s just a mass game. So computers have won that targeting. Yeah, yeah. The moment it’s 50 50, but machines will win messaging. Ah, that’s the bit you should focus on. You should go and be a persuasive copywriter then you’ll be safe. I was completely wrong, g PT has obviously changed that massively. And it, we’ve gotta remember it’s only been four or five months. Yeah. When we were playing with G P T back when it was version two and then version three about three years ago. But this just a new interface just grabbed everybody’s attention.

(05:44): A hundred billion users in two months. And here we are now, text the video, as you say, is not that far away. Text, the image is blown everybody’s minds. And it’s less than a year since Darley came out. Where are we go? Yes. Yeah. We will be sitting here in a year or two saying, Hey machine, I need six videos for YouTube, three for TikTok. Oh, go on, give me one for something else as well. No, not like that. A bit more like this shorter, bigger. It quite phenomenal where we’re at. It’s, it’s right to say, but it does change everything.

John Jantsch (06:20): Well and you know, there’s still people there saying, oh yeah, but they can’t write headlines as good as a really good copywriter. But what my contention is, a lot of times I’ll throw six headlines out there. I’m like, that is the best one. Well that’s not what the market’s held me. Right. Nobody can predict.

Mike Rhodes (06:38): I think what a lot of people have done is that they try and make it a either or thing and it shouldn be Yes. Yes. And the way we use it for images makes it much clearer. And then you take that approach to text. Yes, priming is important. Yes, the prompt is important. And yes, people are gonna call themselves prompt engineers, but it’s playing with the machine, the back and forth, the iteration that really, if you go and find a time lapse video on YouTube of a really good artist playing with something like Mid Journey and what they come up with over the course of half an hour, it’s not about the perfect prompt gets you this incredible thing. It’s that interplays machines are gonna augment us. They already do. I mean, I have no idea what’s on my calendar unless I look at Google Calendar. I can’t read the thing without these anymore.

John Jantsch (07:25): Well and we’ve been, you know, we’ve been using Google Maps for how long? Well you know,

Mike Rhodes (07:29): Absolutely. And in the early days people used to drive off the end of the pier, you know, because they were blindly following map. So use it at your own risk. Don’t blindly follow it and you’ll be okay. Yeah,

John Jantsch (07:38): Yeah, yeah. And you know, one of the things, I think what you just alluded to there was design, creative design has always been an iterative, you know, process. Yeah. I mean , if you watched, you know any designer, you know, they’re doing that anyway. But now what we’re getting now is we’re just getting efficiencies and speed and we’re now able to have 200 variations.

Mike Rhodes (07:57): That’s a really good point. I read there’s a wonderful book called Creative by the President of Pixar. And we all think that a, an amazing movie like Toy Story just gets born and just comes into the world one day that goes through multiple, multiple iterations that the wonderful movie up, you know, the house with all the balloons and the dog and that entire movie was rewritten five times and then brought into The Genius is a Pixar and absolutely played and taken apart and put back together. It’s always been that iterative process. And if you treat the AI like a pretty good intern who can come up with an unlimited number of ideas and a great first draft. Right? I used it yesterday to write a sales page, the video script for the sales page, five different hooks for ads, then to write the ad, then to ask the questions for the application process on the back of the sales page. It was phenomenal. Four and a half thousand words took me an hour and I now have everything I need for the whole marketing plan. It’s just, yeah. Crazy. But it’s here.

John Jantsch (09:00): So let’s do a couple more terms out there before we talk more about ai. Where does programmatic advertising, geofencing, you know, some of those kind of, I don’t, are they niche areas or subsets of advertising where, you know, where do those fit today? Or maybe just briefly even describe kind of your relationship with the both of those.

Mike Rhodes (09:17): It’s funny, we have people sort of mention programmatic to us quite often. Oh should we be doing programmatic? And we also tell, well you are good is programmatic, Facebook is programmatic. It’s just, there’s sort of a corner of the advertising world where a group of people have decided, well we can charge a lot for CPMs if we kind of obfuscate some things and we make this seem much harder than it is. Google display network is programmatic. And yes, there’s some differences, but ultimately a machine is making all of these decisions. So I think that as long as the business gets the data that they need back to inform them and to have the insights and there is enough transparency where they can do that, then it doesn’t really matter what medium that business uses. I mean as long as they’re using something that’s right for them, for their particular need. If you are highly visual product and a female audience, then Pinterest might be worth a crack. If you know you need to say something through video, then might be, maybe it’s reals, maybe it’s YouTube shorts, there’s an unlimited amount, you’ve gotta test a lot of stuff. You go where your audience is. The problem now is that your audience is everywhere. They’re on 20 different channels and most businesses can’t do 20 different channels. So you pick one, you master one, and then you move to a second.

John Jantsch (10:33): Yeah, you won well instead of five poorly.

Mike Rhodes (10:36): Yes. Yes.

John Jantsch (10:37): So, so I mentioned another uh, kind of trendy term geofencing, you know, does that have a place for certain businesses? Is it too creepy? I think

Mike Rhodes (10:47): We all know the stats at this point. Google know more about us than our spouse does. So it knows where you are, where you normally are, what device you’re on, what the weather is. They’ve tested. If the phase of the moon had an impact, it didn’t, but they tested it. So what else might they have tested? So I think of geofencing as just where is your audience rather than, we don’t do that sort of crazy stuff of like only show an ad when they walk past the door of my store and then show them this ad and then to do that. I don’t know how effective that is. And in the world we’re going into where more of that data is hidden because of privacy reasons. Mm-hmm. , I think maybe it’s had, if it’s day in the sun and we’ll have to find new and more creative ways. And I’m sure we all will.

John Jantsch (11:31): This is a, I wouldn’t say it’s a hot topic, it is a debated topic amongst a lot of, I think folks like yourself. You know, is there a place for what people might refer to as brand advertising or you know, long sale cycle trust building type of advertising as opposed to, you know, how do I get today’s dollars? How do you ba I mean are you on the side of you need both? Are you on the side of one is hard to really, you know, justify or where do you fall on the need for kinda long-term advertising and short-term advertising if we want call it that way,

Mike Rhodes (12:03): We’re gonna need a bigger boat. We, I was on stage last week at conference with my head of strategy. Trevor Henselwood, a great guy and he talked about this exactly, I mean had two quotes both from the same guy, Aash kk, who for many years was Google’s digital evangelist. Sure. And the quote was something along the lines of, it’s impossible to think of a business that has only done performance marketing for 25 years and been a huge success. And then the next slide was, it’s impossible to think of a company that’s only done brand marketing for 25 years and been a huge success. I think most businesses need to do both. However, if you are a relatively small business, let’s say sub 20 mil, then you are gonna spend the majority of your budget on performance. And you absolutely should be spending something on awareness.

(12:52): Yes, it’s gonna be harder to measure. Yes. You can’t really draw the line from, oh we did that and then that happened, but we know we shouldn’t be doing that anyway. But clients love to do that because they want to see that return on investment. And if I’m tipping 10 grand a month into this machine, I love seeing that I get 70 or 95 or 113 out the other side. What do you mean I need to tip in another five and not tell how well it did? That seems risky. And so clients sort of often will push back on that certainly. But once you reach the point where you know, you need to grow a brand where you have aspirations of market share and share of wallet and those sorts of terms get thrown around a boardroom, then you’re probably gonna start increasing the share of your spend on, on that sort of harder to measure top of funnel if the funnel even exists anymore

John Jantsch (13:41): As a small business. Let me throw you anecdotally, what we see is when we stop running, what I would call brand ads, our performance ads don’t perform as well.

Mike Rhodes (13:54): Correct. , we’ve seen this a lot over the past year and a half since iOS 14, a lot of businesses couldn’t see the same results from their Facebook ads because of all of the tracking changes. And so they started pulling back on Facebook spend starting with top of funnel spend. And yet, yeah, you know, weeks, months later performance starts to drop. The audience just isn’t. Trevor actually had a wonderful piece in his talk about you can even use something like Performance Max this bike box of a thing to just go for new people just very cheaply, tiny portion of your budget. Please control it well, but just let it go out there and find completely new people. Cause you can’t convert people that have never heard of you. But it’s a really good

John Jantsch (14:34): Point. Yeah. And what we, I mean we focus on, certainly because of the market I’m in is just all of that’s just teaching. You know, all of that’s just like, wow, this guy’s got good ideas. You know, there’s no, I’m not trying to sell anything just trying to have new people go, oh, that that’s somebody I wanna pay attention to. And when, like I say, when we stop doing that, you know, we stop having great as good a results from some of our other programs,

Mike Rhodes (14:56): Which, which makes complete sense. That’s where word of mouth starts, right? You’re being useful and valuable to people. Like Seth Golden said, advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. And if you’re just focused on bonus shit and holding under everything else, then that’s a very short term mindset. And it might work in the short term, but it’s not it,

John Jantsch (15:14): It unfortunately does for a lot of people in the short term . Yeah.

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(17:17): So let’s talk budget. When somebody comes to you, how do you help them analyze? I know this is a really tough question cuz it’s a big, it depends, but how do you help people analyze what they should be spending on online advertising?

Mike Rhodes (17:28): So with all of the changes in tracking that have happened and you know harder to tie those dots together, like we talked about before, we tend to look at sort of marketing efficiency ratio and the business goals. You know, what are you trying to do? Where are you trying to get to? We are very good at optimizing. So we’ll start by looking at what is already there. Now if somebody comes to us, they’ve never run any ads before, then it’s gonna be a different conversation. But if they’re already spending 50 grand a month on Google ads, then we’ll look at that, you know, issues and opportunities within that, tweak that and prove that. And then we can start, once the data is right, then we can start to forecast and predict better. Overall we see clients, there’s a huge range. We’ve got clients with that sort of marketing efficiency ratio, business roas, however you’d like to term it, anywhere from 2% to 33%.

(18:19): So most businesses can’t do 33% spending one out of every $3 that comes in top line, spending that back out the door on ads. That isn’t gonna work for most. But if you’ve got the funding and if that’s your business goal, if that’s the path you are on, then you know, let’s make that work. Not many businesses are gonna do that. The majority are around about 8%. We had a client coming to us last year around 2%. They knew they probably weren’t spending enough, actually maybe it was one and a half percent and it was a conversation to get that up to two and then up to four. And this year they’re on eight because they’ve seen huge results from doing that. But it, it depends on where the business is at. Depends how skinny their margin is. It’s, yeah, there’s a, as you say right at the beginning, it depends. But I think that overall percentage of just even knowing where you are now is a small business. What, how much are you spending on ads in total as a percentage of total top line revenue? And then this whole game is about making some changes and measuring what happens next.

John Jantsch (19:21): Yeah, and I, you know, I frequently have conversation with clients that we work with that it’s not just how much is that ad bringing me today? What’s the lifetime value of that new client? You know that, you know, a lot of times when people realize that and they’re like, oh yes actually that client’s worth, you know, $50 or $5,000 or whatever, you know, over a short period of time, maybe I can invest a lot more in my

Mike Rhodes (19:43): Assets. Absolutely. What’s the buying cycle look like? How often is someone gonna buy from you? If you’re a sort of retailer and you do have repeat purchases, then something like Google Analytics four can be very useful with that. It’ll actually show you the chart of how that person goes up and what is, what are they worth to you. Maybe not lifetime. I find a lot of small businesses find it tricky to wrap their head around the term lifetime. But what’s the 90 day value of that person? What’s the one year value of the typical customer? That’s pretty easy to work out and yes, I agree it does, does open eyes when you do it that way. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:15): So, so how do you tie conversion rate optimization to, you know, to your ad spend? Because you know, you probably have this, people come to you and they want you to run ads and you’re sending them to stuff that won’t convert. You know, is that, you know, how do you, how do you make the case for those two go hand in hand?

Mike Rhodes (20:31): They absolutely go hand in hand. I mean any kind of performance marketing, you’re gonna hit diminishing returns after a point. You, there’s very few ad accounts that we see where you could feasibly expect to get a 30% improvement in performance in a week. Right. A good CRO firm given enough time and enough room to experiment, may well hit upon an experiment that gets you that 10, 20, 30% boost. It’s probably not gonna be the first experiment they do cuz they’re usually under pressure just to get a win early on. We don’t do a lot of that in-house. We do give a lot of, I guess said advice strategy examples. We find that almost every small business, whether they have a marketing team or it’s a one person, almost every business is one person short in the marketing department. So giving them more homework and a laundry list of things to

John Jantsch (21:20): Do. Right, right, right.

Mike Rhodes (21:20): Isn’t always well received. A lot of people know that they need to work on that, but it often falls further down the list. Um, I find it staggering that the number of businesses still that might be spending 20, 50, a hundred grand a month on ads, but won’t invest by sending

John Jantsch (21:37): Them, sending them to their homepage.

Mike Rhodes (21:39): Yeah. Or I won’t invest, won’t experiment. So we work with Yeah. Number of other businesses. We don’t do a lot of that, but we send people their way and say you really need to work on your website. Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:50): I was gonna ask you about GA4 when you brought it up and I’m afraid that that might open up a can of worms, but are you, obviously we’re all going there. Google has no incentive not to turn it on . Right? They’re getting fined every day that GA3 stays on. So, you know what, what’s your advice to business owners? Not just that they have to embrace it, but I mean how did they wrap their head around it after using this other tool so long?

Mike Rhodes (22:14): Yeah, we’ve all, I’m just off this morning to do a training session with a client in person on the other side of town. Yes. Apart from the other stuff as you said, don’t leave it too long. Don’t leave it to the last minute. Yes it’s gonna happen. Yes, there are other tools out there if you want to get off the Google system, but it actually, this is gonna be heretical to say I don’t mind it now. I mean I’ve been pretty deep in it for a year and a half. It’s taken me a while. I have a course now I train people how to use it. Yeah. And it’s like everything like Google ads make how many changes since we’ve been around five massive changes to the ui. Right? Every time it happens everybody throws the pram. Sure. Toys out the pram and nah, I don’t wanna do this anymore.

(22:56): We all hate change but we’re incredibly resilient. We’ve learned that for the past three years. Yeah, yeah. And you lock yourself in a dark room for a couple of days. You go through some courses, you watch some YouTubes. However it is that you learn, you get your data in there and play with it. And if you haven’t got it set up, go play with a Google demo account. It isn’t all that. I mean it’s bad, it’s a beast. It takes 47 clicks to get anything done. But once you know how to do those 47 clicks it becomes a lot less scary. And I’m at the point now where I look at Universal and go, Ooh, that’s old .

John Jantsch (23:29): . Yeah. I think there’s two things. Obviously interface changes freak everybody out cuz it’s like, where’s that button that I used to click? But also it comes at the data from a whole different view. Totally and that’s totally different. Probably the part that’s gonna take the longest for people to understand

Mike Rhodes (23:45): And the numbers don’t match up and you can drive yourself batty comparing universal with GA4. It’s, which is why we’ve been saying for a year, run them in parallel so that you understand the nuance, you understand the difference. So that when we get to July one this year and still half the websites have not moved to GA4, I think there’s gonna be a lot of panic in July. I’m going on holiday, I’m not gonna be around in July.

John Jantsch (24:09): Although I have heard that Google’s gonna auto migrate. Um, yeah they start sites if they don’t

Mike Rhodes (24:14): But it’s clunky and it doesn’t work wonderfully well. It, this is a great chance to reset and start to really value data if you take all of those universal goals and some people have got like three, four views because they ran out of room with only 20 goals per view. Mm. And they’re just gonna move all of that across. Most people in the business were not around and all those goals were set up. Almost nobody in the business understands why we actually measure all of those things anyway. Nobody realizes that half of them are broken. This is a

John Jantsch (24:44): Great pages they track don’t exist anymore. Right. Yeah.

Mike Rhodes (24:47): . Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Sit down and think what questions do we actually want to ask of the data? What do we really need to measure? Maybe we don’t need to track these 67 things maybe that isn’t really important to the business anymore. What do we really need? Let’s get this thing set up and working properly and let’s for the first time maybe for many businesses actually start to value data. I love asking businesses, where does data sit on your balance sheet? , . Cause they just don’t value it. They all know that data driven and data informed, but nobody really values data. And you can’t be an AI company without first being an analytics company. You can’t get to being an analytics company if you don’t have good data to base that analytics on. Peter Dund says by the end of this decade, you’re either an AI business or you’re out of business. Now he sells a lot of books by saying sentences like that and I don’t know if that’s true, but we will all be using AI a hell of more than we are today. But yeah, I data to do that.

John Jantsch (25:45): I think what he’s really alluding to is you just won’t be able to compete . Mm-hmm. is what it really amounts to. Right. It’s because everybody will be much more efficient, they’ll be much, you know, more informed. I mean that, that’s really gonna be the, you know, the challenge Mike, tell people where they can reach out and find more about you. Any of your work, any of your books,

Mike Rhodes (26:02): Easiest places, just to head to our websavvy.com.au. Cuz down here in Australia, hey, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m not particularly active on the socials because I’m an old person with two little kids and uh, I’ve got far better things to do than play on Twitter all day. But yeah, savvy.com au. I also have another business agencysavvy.com where we train a lot of agencies how to do what we do. GA4 Google ads and all that sort of stuff. So yeah. Awesome. Whether you want training or you want some second pair of eyes over your ad account, come find me and we would love to help you.

John Jantsch (26:34): Awesome. Well I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing uh, podcast. And I’m certainly hopeful we can run into each other one of these days out there on the road or on a boat or whatever it would take.

Mike Rhodes (26:44): That would be lovely. Thank you John.

John Jantsch (26:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements 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 Kristi Harold. She’s the founder and CEO of JAM, a multi-million dollar global business that has connected millions of people through play. Since its inception, one of the largest adult recreational sports leagues in the world. The JAM team has produced and delivered over 3,500 playful corporate events in over 30 countries since the summer of 2020, and has been awarded Canada’s most admired culture award in 2022. Kristi consults and speaks on how to move a culture from surviving to thriving, and she recently authored the bestselling book we’re gonna talk about today. It pays to Play: How Play Improves Business Culture. So welcome to the show, Kristi.

Kristi Herold (01:47): Thank you, John. I’m thrilled to be here.

John Jantsch (01:49): This is a milestone, a show for me. This is the first time I’ve had the sister of a former guest on the show, Cameron Herold. Siblings. Siblings. I don’t think I’ve ever had, I’ve had husband or wife never siblings? I don’t think so. Awesome. Little little thing. I get to check off the box. So I wanna know, how does somebody get a job playing?

Kristi Herold (02:13): How did get a job playing? Oh, that’s a great question. Come work for JAM. .

John Jantsch (02:17): . That’s what I’m wondering. Like how did you get that job?

Kristi Herold (02:21): I mean, I started, I just,

John Jantsch (02:22): Other than starting the company, that’s the number one, but, but what led you there? Let’s put it that way.

Kristi Herold (02:28): Well, I was, you know, Cameron and I grew up in a small town about four hours north of Toronto. And then I went, when I went off to university after university, I moved to Toronto and I was like small town girl, living in a lonely world, working at a company and thinking I knew I wanted to run my own business, but I didn’t know what, and I’d heard about these adult recreational sports leagues in the US in San Francisco, and I thought I should try that in Toronto. Like what a great way to meet people, solve my own problem here and try running a business. And I have a vision that it would become as big as it has. That wasn’t my intention in 1996. I just wanted to do something fun and help people and connect and play. And yeah, so here we are 27 years later, getting a couple hundred thousand people annually playing sports and now our corporate business has, is really taking off. So it’s been really a fun ride.

John Jantsch (03:19): So I, I can’t tell you how often entrepreneurs say I started this business to solve my own problem. I mean, it is, it is so inherent in kind of the, you know, it’s like I have a problem, here’s the only way I could figure out how to fix it, is to start a business that, that that didn’t. And I, you know, it, I think one of the beauties of that of course is that I think it does lead to a lot of passion in what you do. Let’s just start within the workplace as you’re pitching this idea maybe to some sort of corporate program to an executive. I mean, what do you talk about as the top line benefits of bringing this into a culture?

Kristi Herold (03:54): Hmm. That’s a great question. Well, I’ve always wanna start with w what are you being challenged with? What’s the, what are the challenges that your organization is facing from a cultural perspective? And what we’re hearing a lot of these days is retention, right? Is, I mean, it’s no surprise, it’s a great resignation and those numbers have gone gotten worse. So retention, engagement, energy, physical and mental health, a lack of connection and a lack of kind of innovation and creativity. So interestingly enough, I sort of started to look at it and was like, well these are all the challenges companies are facing. Our company’s not dealing with that because we have a really fun culture. We have integrated playfulness into our culture. And that’s where sort of the idea for writing the book came from. And I really believe that integrating a little bit of playfulness into the every day at work.

(04:43): I’m not saying stop everything and go play a game of basketball every day. Like that’s not what I’m talking about. And what I’m also not saying is once a year company event doesn’t make for great culture, right? It’s finding a way to make work fun every day. And play has a fantastic way of doing that. And there are ways to integrate laughs and playfulness that will connect your team and help strengthen bonds and relationships amongst them, which then in turn helps all those issues, helps with retention, helps with engagement, right? Helps with physical and mental health, you know, so

John Jantsch (05:16): Yeah, I think another thing that happens too, a lot of times we get very, you know, siloed in work that, you know, we don’t really get to know the people we work beside, you know, all the time because it’s always about the meeting and it’s always about the task list. And I do think that bringing any kind of outside of work, if you will, type of activity, I mean it allows us to get to know each other better, allows us to see commonality and allows us to feel maybe safer, you know, even at work. And I think that’s probably a big part of this retention and engagement, isn’t it?

Kristi Herold (05:45): Absolutely. It’s getting to know our teammates as people who we can then have a laugh with, trust them a little more because we’ve gotten to know them as humans, feel that we can be a little more vulnerable and maybe ask for help if we need it. So then you get like everyone working together as a team towards the common goal for the company. And if you don’t have that, if everyone’s just doing their own thing and are afraid to ask for help or afraid to admit they don’t know something or because they don’t trust there’s no, you know, a lack of trust or in the relationship in the organization, like all of that can be so easily solved by having a few laughs together.

John Jantsch (06:24): Do you still get, I mean, I’m thinking the sort of old hierarchy old, you know, structure of a corporation where they’re, you know, they actually are still people there in leadership that think this is a really ridiculous idea, you know, to bring play. You know, there’s work and there’s play and they don’t mix. And you know, we’re a serious company. I mean, do you still get that pushback? I’m sure that it’s breaking down, the walls are breaking down, but do you still get that some

Kristi Herold (06:49): Absolutely. They’re, and those are not gonna be our target market and not, you know, I mean, I would go toe to toe with anyone. If someone wanted to debate me on this, I would happily debate anybody on this topic. And I think it would be hard to, I think anyone would be hard pressed to prove me wrong on this, honestly, if they took the time to actually listen, like, to dig a little deeper as to what I’m talking about, because I’m not saying like spreadsheets still need to happen. You still need to have your board meetings, you gotta have your day. Like all the work has to happen of course. But if you can do that work and integrate some laughs throughout your day, how much happier is your team of employees going to become going to be coming to work every day? And so, yeah, there are people who are resistant to the idea of a, but I think it’s more they just don’t understand it. And

John Jantsch (07:43): Do you think there’s also an aspect of, I mean, play is kind of beaten out of us, you know, as we grow up, right? I mean, as little as kids, it was like, oh, the only thing that existed and then it’s slowly, you know, you had to become more responsible and you had to do this and you, I mean, is there somewhere there’s some resistance because it’s like, wait a minute, this feels socially wrong almost.

Kristi Herold (08:03): Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny you, the last two things you’ve said to me are, are things I clearly talk about. I do a lot of keynote speaking now on this, and I speak to specifically to this. I actually say, you know, so many people think work is work, play is play, and never the two shall meet. And this idea of when we were kids, it was our favorite thing to do. So why do we stop? Like why do we stop? Yeah, I play every day. I find a, whether I’m playing my guitar or I play tennis, or I play a game of cards, or I’m having a playful banter with my, the way I communicate with my staff, there’s ways to play all the time. And so why do we stop? Because George Bernard Shaw said, we don’t get old because we stop. No, we don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.

John Jantsch (08:52): Yeah. Awesome. One. So let’s, you mentioned mental health already, and I mean, I, this is a topic that certainly has always been a very large topic, I think in the workplace, you know, let’s throw Covid under the bus one more time. , and you know, the work from home, you know, that’s gone on. I mean, how big a crisis do you think we’re dealing with in the workplace? I know you’re not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or sociologist, but just in your work, how big of an issue do you think that is? Like leaders need to be addressing

Kristi Herold (09:20): It? Was it, I think pandemic proportions or endemic proportions? I don’t know what the proper terminology is. Prior to the pandemic, it’s only gotten worse. And yes, I’m not a psychologist. I do, however, have six kids between the ages of 18 and 22. And guess what? All the kids and their kids, these, that age group and all their friends are all struggling with anxiety and depression and mental health challenges. And it’s, it is coming to work. It’s, yeah, you know, if people aren’t happy about coming to work every day, if they wake up every morning, dreading going to work, it’s not gonna be good for their mental health. So if we as employers and leaders can make the workplace a little more fun, a little more engaging and rewarding to be part of your team is gonna be so much happier and perform so much better.

(10:19): Yeah, I had two employees leave during the pandemic for, for better career. They felt they were leaving for, you know, better career opportunities and more money. And I wish them both the best. Like anytime over 27 years have had lots of people come and go. And I tend to keep in touch with people that I, you know, I care about as friends who inevitably, lots of my former teammates I keep in regular touch with. Anyway, I remember after about three months, this fellow Sandeep had left and I reached out. I’m like, Hey, how’s it going? I hope your new gig has been well, we miss you. And he’s always this super upbeat, positive guy. He responded, I’m miserable and I’m giving my letter of resignation tomorrow and I don’t have another job to go to. And I was like, what is going on? Fast forward, he’s back on our team, Taylor also left back on our team, and Taylor said to me, she said, you know, I could feel every day my me mental health was declining every day. I had to get up and go to that job. And she’s like, I, the biggest issue was I was working with people who didn’t care about me as a person. And at JAM I know I have people who care about me as a person and I care about them. And so she, you know, like it’s a really powerful thing to, to care and have connections and relationships in the workplace. We spend a lot of time at work,

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(13:14): A lot of play is physical, a lot of play is analog. Let’s talk about that as the anecdote for, I mean, let’s face it, most of us sit in a chair and delete email all day long and, uh, you know, so, so as an anecdote for technology and how technology is really running our lives now, h how do you, how do you sort of insert play into that conversation?

Kristi Herold (13:36): Great question. So, well, ironically interesting , the pandemic shut down our adult sports leagues that had been operating for 25 years in a number of different cities shut us down for almost 18 months. And when we first were mandated the like Canadian mandates were really harsh. Our Michigan operations weren’t shut down quite as badly. But so when we were first mandated to shut down, we were like, how are we going to survive? And I, I remember thinking we have to stay true to our core purpose of connecting people through play, but how do you, I was like, I don’t, and I actually, I remember having a very tearful conversation with my brother Cameron, and I was saying, he was saying, you have to pivot. You have to pivot, you’re gonna have to go online. And I was like, you can’t play soccer through your phone.

(14:21): You can’t play beach volleyball on your computer. It doesn’t work. And but then we opened our minds to possibilities and we actually started meeting needs of company teams who were all of a sudden working from home missing the banter that they, the fun laughs that they could have in the office. So we started doing online games, but we were like, we called them like we’re hosting the best kitchen party ever kind of thing. Like it’s, you’re in a Zoom, but JAM hosts are leading you through a lot of fun and laughter games. Yeah. And has taken off. I mean we built a significant business in a very short time doing that. And now that’s morphed into, we’re still doing virtual, we’re also offering hybrid opportunities and in-person opportunities. So we’ve got it all covered now for the companies that a lot of companies have stayed remote.

(15:07): Right. And, and it’s a, it’s not a negative thing, but that means, you know, I’ve got a teammate who lives in Paris, France, another one in Vancouver, somebody in Calgary, someone who just moved to Cyprus. Um, I can stay connected with them and have some laughs at them by doing virtual events. I don’t have to fly them on a plane once every two months to stay connected and laughing and strengthening our relationships. So there’s positives and negatives to sort of the technology I think. But I think if used properly it can still be a really powerful positive tool.

John Jantsch (15:41): Yeah, I was really talking more about the addictive behaviors, you know, the, some of the online gamings and the, you know, checking faces a million times a day, , I think, you know, we, we’ve sort of lost control I think in a lot of ways, you know, based on the technology we thought was, you know, going to actually give us more control. Right. You know, what I’d love for you to do, if you wouldn’t mind, is give us some examples of how you’ve incorporated play into meetings, you know, teams. Just however, anything you wanna do. I’d love to hear some Sure. Kind of concrete examples that, uh, might get people’s mind spinning about what’s possible.

Kristi Herold (16:15): Yeah. One very easy one that everyone could do starting today. Set up a banter channel in, or a shout out channel or both. We have both in your, whether it’s Slack or Microsoft Teams, whatever your company uses for internal chats, we have a shout out channel. And so every day there are multiple times during the day you’ll see somebody is shouting out someone else for great work done. And it’s, it just is a positive reinforcement. It’s playful and positive. And the banter channel is just where people put silly jokes or funny things like it’s just random banter and it’s, it keeps people laughing and engaged, costs nothing. And it helps build community and relationships. Huddle. We do every single day.

John Jantsch (16:57): We, we actually, I was gonna say we call our shout out channel tacos. So we give each other tacos, so

Kristi Herold (17:04): Okay.

John Jantsch (17:05): We’re completely distributed as, as well . Mm-hmm .

Kristi Herold (17:09): And then we have a huddle every day. We do a seven minute huddle at one o’clock. So if you’re living in Vancouver, it might be 10 in the morning if you’re living in Paris, France, it might be seven in the evening or six in the evening. But everyone comes to huddle and it’s a different leader every single day and huddle. It’s always the exact same agenda. And huddle starts always with good news. Whoever’s the leader has to share their good news and what huddle always ends with. I mean there’s obviously important metrics and stuff that we’re sharing and important announcements throughout the seven minute huddle, but it always ends with leader’s choice. And leader’s choice can range from, I mean one of my favorite ones was the leader said, I would encourage everyone to pick up the phone and someone today who you haven’t talked to in six months, sometimes someone will say, you know, sent post a picture of your first sports team that you ever played on in the banter channel or the best Halloween costume you ever had as a child. Or you know, it just, someone else might say, go for a 15 minute walk today. That is my choice for you as leader to encourage everyone to get outside and get fresh air. You never know what you’re gonna get. And it can be very playful and fun and it allows everyone to shine as a leader because they’re leading this, yeah. This huddle. So you get to meet different personalities.

John Jantsch (18:21): I’m curious, how do you get that done in seven minutes? We sometimes we do a daily huddle. We sometimes struggle to get it done in 15. It

Kristi Herold (18:27): The odd time it does go over, we try and keep it pretty tight and we have a very clear agenda. There’s like five or six points that the leader covers off and it’s their job to keep it tight and it’s o yeah, usually it’s pretty, pretty darn good. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:39): So, so what are some other kind of structured things that you’ve brought into, you know, not just these kind of everyday things, but like where somebody really wanted to make a significant change in culture. And obviously that’s not gonna happen from one, you know, event, but what are some, some avenues that, that you’ve brought in to folks that have really seemed like they’ve been received very well?

Kristi Herold (19:02): Celebrations. We do core value awards highlighting great Achieve like we do the core value awards once a month, celebrating anniversaries, have a company sports team get, you know, offer it to your team cuz there are adult sports leagues in every city across North America. Sure. So sign your team up for a kickball league or a beach volleyball league if they would like, you know, offer it. Maybe you have a company, an office book club. We do that every two months. Perhaps it’s a company rock band or choir for those that aren’t necessarily sporty. There are ways to play every day. Like there are so many ways to play. I mean I could go on and on and we’re not gonna have time to go through it all, but I

John Jantsch (19:37): Bet you there are some examples of it in it pays to play. So la last question. What kind of guitar do you play?

Kristi Herold (19:47): Acoustic and I only started playing in my early forties, but, so I’m very average with guitar, but I have a lot of fun. I really just play so that I can sing along cause I like to sing so Awesome. I do it to entertain myself.

John Jantsch (19:59): Well I’ve been doing it for about 50 years and so I have a whole wall if you could see my, a whole wall of guitars to that I love to play with. So I always love to hear what other people play, but I mostly play acoustic guitar as well.

Kristi Herold (20:12): That’s awesome. My, my favorite guitar, I have one in Toronto that is a seagull, which is a Canadian brand and it’s a beautiful guitar. I love it. John, I did wanna ta mention, since I couldn’t get into lots of tactics, I’m happy to offer a, the a free PLAYbook PDF document that would list sort of a top 10 list of tactics for your listeners so I can get you that for you.

John Jantsch (20:31): That that would be awesome. That would be great. Also, invite people where they might bind the book or where they might find out more about, uh, the work that you are doing at JAM.

Kristi Herold (20:39): Yeah, that would be great. kristiherold.com is is my website. K R I S T I H E R O L D.com. And then jamgroup.com is our, is where we have all our corporate event offerings and adult sports leagues.

John Jantsch (20:53): Awesome. Well, Kristi, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road or on a field or in a, on a Accord or something like that.

Kristi Herold (21:03): That would be fun. One, let’s do another one with both Cameron and I, we can banter together with you.

John Jantsch (21:08): Oh, that would be very fun. I’ve, I’d love it. Let’s do it. All right.

Kristi Herold (21:12): Let’s talk about growing up in an entrepreneurial household or something.

John Jantsch (21:15): No kidding. Yeah, pretty crazy.

Kristi Herold (21:17): Thanks John.

John Jantsch (21:18): 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, . 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements 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 Gaia Bernstein. She is a law professor, co-director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and co-director of the Gibbons Institute for Law, Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes, teaches and lectures at the intersection of law, technology, health, and privacy. Her forthcoming book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies shatters the illusion that we can control how much time we spend on our screens by resorting to self-help measures. So, Gaia, that was a mouthful, but welcome to the show.

Gaia Bernstein (01:35): Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:37): So let’s get right into the, there. There are some very interesting, scary, ominous things in this book, but there have been a number of books recently. I’ve had a couple of folks on my show over the last couple years that have written books essentially talking about how, you know, we need to untether and we need to, you know, not be so, you know, wired. I mean, what are you kind of hoping to add to that collection of warning books, I suppose we can call them.

Gaia Bernstein (02:06): Yeah, that’s a great question. Most of the books, I think practically all books written so far were written by psychologists or right marketing experts and people who were looking at a problem, and many of them agreed that there was an issue, but they were looking at self-help measures. How can we help ourselves? In the extreme case, they would talk about therapy, but I’m coming from a different direction. I’m look saying basically we have been trying this for years. We try our screen time. She just keeps going up. Yeah. And we are blaming ourselves instead of looking at other solutions.

John Jantsch (02:48): So yeah, so as an example, I remember one of the books was talking about like removing all the apps from your phone and you know, things like that. Right. So it was just kind of doing all these measures to take back control. But I think the whole first part of the book is about this idea of it’s an illusion, this control. So do we first have to understand that before any kind of measures makes sense?

Gaia Bernstein (03:12): Yes, definitely. I basically, we now know we spent tons of time online. That’s no surprise to anybody at this point, but when we got into this, we did not realize that we are going to end up spending more. So much time. We thought we were just adopt, adopting, you know, an app or we’re going to start texting on the go. So it was small decisions. We didn’t realize that once we start using them, tech industry is manipulating us to spend much more time than we intended. So we were under the illusion, we were making all the choices. One fact we were not, and by the time we got it, it was a bit too late because our life was completely entangled in screens.

John Jantsch (03:54): Yeah. I wonder, I know somewhere in the book, and there’s obviously lots of research on this, in fact, there’s apps to track this, how much time we actually spend, say, on mobile devices and things. And I would bet money that most people greatly underestimate how much time they actually are on the devices.

Gaia Bernstein (04:12): I think people do underestimate, I still underestimate myself. I’m shocked every week to find out how much time I spend on my phone. The, although I think that the problem is that these apps are part of the illusion here. Yeah. Because we get notifications of how much time we spend on our phone, and the idea is that now if we know we’re going to do better , but these apps and other self-help tools are not really getting at the addictive elements of tech, it just doesn’t make us believer in con in control.

John Jantsch (04:46): So let’s just start with this premise. Is there something evil going on here?

Gaia Bernstein (04:52): I think we, for the last few years, we’ve gotten a lot of information from the tech industry, from whistleblowers. People like Tristan Harris. Francis Hogan basically showed that companies like Facebook and other online companies, and they basically know that there are addicting users to spend more time online. They’re hired psychologists to do that. And when they realize how it’s affects kids, for example, how Instagram affects especially girls and how, and they still decided they’re just going to ignore it because the whole business model is based on having users spend more time on screen.

John Jantsch (05:31): Right, right. Yeah. It’s amazing the notices you get now, it’s like, so and so just posted. I was like, I don’t even know who that person is, , you know, but there’s this like, here’s the message we want to, it’s been, you know, 12 minutes since you’ve been on our app, so you we want to get you back in there. It’s pretty, pretty crazy. How, how manipulative, I guess it really is. I mean, is that, I know you used the word liberally in in the book. I mean, is that what we’re talking about is intentional manipulation?

Gaia Bernstein (05:58): It’s definitely intentional manipulation. It’s basically you, we get most of our products for free. Yeah. And we get Gmail for free. We get Facebook for free. These companies, the, this business model has been in effect for, since the beginning of the internet. Basically they make money by harvesting our data and our time. And there’s not been enough attention to the time part of this much more attention to the privacy issue. But basically we have to stay on line for as long as possible so they can collect more data on us and then so they can target more advertising in us. So they basically, they create designs to make sure that their business model works.

John Jantsch (06:40): Yeah. So, so there have been some, I was gonna say hints, but they’re far more overt than that suggestions that, that some of the current state of mental health in certain countries, the state of political environments, the state of, you know, cultural and social norms or the changes, you know, can really be linked to this sort of, these sort of new norms. Would you suggest that there’s something to that?

Gaia Bernstein (07:08): I think for the last two and three years, we’ve had a lot of data coming out. If we’re talking about kids, I think it’s pretty clear there’s a public health crisis of kids mental health issues related to addiction impact and cognitive development. And there’s also a lot of research about adults, how it affects their wellbeing. Mm-hmm. about how these algorithms that are supposed to keep us, us online for longer create hate. And we’ve basically been in this science wars for a decade, but the evidence now is so, so far. And it, I think that there are very few people who don’t think there’s something very serious going on here.

John Jantsch (07:50): So you mentioned kids, um, in, in particular, and I never really got into the online gaming thing, just, it just never appealed to me. And so I’m really not as aware of that. But I’ve read some articles recently that, that talk about the addiction of, particularly of online gaming. I mean 10, 12 hour days, you know, spent , you know, in inside of the games. I mean, it, I think that goes far beyond say, you know, somebody who checks Facebook 25 times a day or something. I mean, so, so I know you cover that pretty extensively. And I think that there probably, if people aren’t aware of, you know, some of the addictive behaviors around online gaming, I think particularly it would be pretty alarming, wouldn’t it?

Gaia Bernstein (08:33): I think with online gaming, we see, I would say, but the studies vary, but one to 9% of the gamers are concerned to be clinically addicted. Mm-hmm. that is like, they’re not, they’re spending so much time online, they’re neglecting other areas of life, like school, their work, and, but there are lots of gamers who just play a lot. And I think this overuse of spending so much time on screen when your whole social life is on screen for the games, is very similar to what’s happening with social media. With social media. We just see more girls doing it with games. We see more boys doing it. But the amount of time and the impact and the fact and the features, the design features, which I use in games, are very similar to the features which are used in social media.

John Jantsch (09:19): Yeah. So, so is it, are we talking about something that will be, you know, it will not, the true sort of ends will not reveal themselves for 20 years and at that point will have societal crisis?

Gaia Bernstein (09:33): I think the what’s happening is already revealing itself. I basically, I believe teachers are noticing what the kids are different than they used to be. Especially after spending the pandemic in front of screens. They have trouble paying attention. We can see kids are behaving differently. They’re looking at screens, they’re not talking to each other. The data shows are staying at home more. They’re not going to parties, they’re not meeting up with each other. So, and then you have all the data about mental health, the mm-hmm , the uptick in the suicide rate, anxiety and depression start in 2010. At first it was clear if there were other factors, but I think the enough studies showing now there’s a correlation between smartphones and social media and the climb and kids mental health, especially girls,

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(11:56): So you make some parallels that, you know, at first I was like, why are we talking about cigarettes? But you kind of draw some parallels to the tobacco industry, which was, was found to, you know, do everything they could to make these things that they sell more addictive. And consequently, a lot of litigation, a lot of, you know, things happen that I don’t really know what the state of that industry is, but certainly some regulation, pretty heavy regulation came. Are you suggesting that that’s where we’re headed here? I mean that at some point somebody’s gonna be able to sue one of these online gaming companies because they are making the games too addictive.

Gaia Bernstein (12:36): So basically it’s already happening. Part of what I show in the book, I draw the parallels because I think there’s a very similar strategy going on of basically cigarette companies blamed people for smoking saying it’s not responsible. Our responsibility, you’re choosing to smoke, right? Same thing is happening with tech. And the same strategies, legal strategies are taking place. So we already have a lot of parents suing games. There’s a very famous loss going on Quebec now suing Fortnite for being addictive as cocaine. They’re, for the last year, there have been multiple parents actually youth class actions suing social networks for addicting kids and affecting their mental health. And I think most interesting, a very interesting parallel to the cigarette companies, we’re now seeing school systems suing social networks for addicting kids because they have to pay for the cost of the kids mental health. That’s exactly what happened with the cigarette companies when states started suing cigarette companies because they had to pay for the health cost of smokers.

John Jantsch (13:43): So while people are maybe taking that tack, do you see that is really gonna, will that end up being able to influence? Yes. So they get fined, they pay a lot of money, they’re still selling cigarettes. Right? So will the same thing happen to Facebook? They get fined, they have some regulations, but they, but it doesn’t really change anything.

Gaia Bernstein (14:04): So first of all, I think things have changed with smoking. I think far, of course we have e-cigarettes, which is a different story, but smoking has gone down significantly since the first studies came up in the 1950s and regulations started sixties, 1970s and lawsuits. So, but the thing is, it’s not as no magic pill. It’s not as though, you know, there’s gonna be one Supreme court case. There’s going to change all of this. Right. This is not going to happen. Yeah. So basically what we are going to see is what happened with cigarettes. There were multiple actions, class actions, legislations, advertising warnings, all of this happened and things changed over time. This is, we’re already seeing this happening now. And that’s, I predict what we are going to see here. We also have like, I would say the Achiles heel of the personal responsibility argument and kids are so affected and we saw basically where kids are concerned, it’s much easier to regulate because it’s hard. It’s harder to argue that kids are making choices, that they’re responsible. Right. So I think regulation to protect children is where things are going to start shifting for all of us, not just for children.

John Jantsch (15:14): So, so you’ll have to prove that you are over 18 or something before you can log into a game or it will come with a warning that says this could cause cancer. I mean, are we talking about similar, similar types of measures?

Gaia Bernstein (15:28): So one of the things I am recommending in the book, I think for example, parents bought their kids Minecraft as an educational game and it’s been declared as one of their most addictive games in all times. I’m sure these parents would’ve loved to know before they downloaded the game, what’s the level of addictiveness. I think if you had some kind of warning, then this would prevent parents from downloading what also might affect game companies to think before they put these addictive measures in there. So I think that’s definitely one thing that, that we are likely to see the issue of age. Well I think there are all kinds of bills trying to restrict if in Utah something’s just passed to restrict the age of kids. This has been happening in other countries as well. But, so it’s complicated because you need to be able to au authenticate the age and Right, right, right. You and kids are very smart technologically. It’s not, I’m not saying it’s easy, but we might see that having kids cannot buy cigarettes until they’re 21. Now, when I was a kid I could just walk, get my parents cigarettes. Nobody said a word.

John Jantsch (16:31): Well, remember we had the machines, you know, right. That, that nobody was checking. Is this some, do you find that, you know, Americans are notoriously whether we actually are free or not or notorious, like I’m gonna make my own choices. You know, I don’t want people telling me I can’t drink, you know, sugar drinks and I can’t drink, or I can’t eat X food. Are there other countries that have embraced this and are really running down the track pretty quickly on, on reigning this in?

Gaia Bernstein (16:58): So there are southeast countries in Southeast Asia have been worried about gaming for over a decade and now more about social and networks. So there’s, of course China, China is a bit of a difficult example because it’s China. So the totalitarian regime, we don’t think that we should be copying their laws. They’ve experimented with lots of systems. One system they’re experimenting with is not actually, they’ve implemented it already. It’s a sh basically restricts how much time kids can spend on social networks. 40 minutes a day on the Chinese TikTok equivalent. And there’s also a limit to how much time they can play games per week. Now it’s interesting because now basically TikTok is trying to restrict kids’ time in the US They’ve already been doing it in China for a while. So we are seeing this, but it’s not just China. I think Japan is doing the same thing. And other countries like Thailand, South Korea have experimented with different methods. So I think it’s important to look there and see what their experience was, what worked, what didn’t work. They’ve tried some methods they decided not work well. Yeah, they used to like, like, you know, getting kids off games at midnight. It was, kids were going crazy when they had to get off at midnight. So I think we should look at the whole spectrum of options and learn because we’ve not been thinking about it for long enough.

John Jantsch (18:18): So as somebody who spends a little time on privacy issues, you know, where does it fall in that line? I mean if, let’s just call it the government. is shutting my computer off at midnight. Are there privacy concerns about that sort of heavy handedness?

Gaia Bernstein (18:36): So there are concern of some privacy advocates who are concerned about the idea of getting people’s age and the identification part of it. So there are issues. The thing is where I, as somebody who writes about privacy as well, I think there’s a strong privacy ad argument for that because the whole business model is based on data and time, as I said. Mm-hmm . So basically the hope is that this business model will be replaced by a different business model, which is not based on our time and our privacy. So I think anything that takes place, which sort of stabilizes this business model is good for privacy as well.

John Jantsch (19:13): Maybe I’m asking the same question, but again, you know, at what point does private enterprise, you know, get overregulated because you know, because the, you know, the ends justify the means.

Gaia Bernstein (19:33): So the question is, I think the big question is how harmful you think a product is, right? Because when we think something is very harmful, we do not have a problem regulating it. Right? So the, but the thing is, even with cigarettes, which we know are vial, we know they cause lung cancer death, it took, the first studies came out in the fifties, only in 1964. The certain general announced it was harmful and then people started slowly to regulate. So the thing is, the big thing is to end the science war and to decide how harmful we think it is. I think for kids it’s definitely very harmful for adults. It’s not doing, it’s not so great either. So if you think something’s harmful, you regulate to protect people. It’s a bit like the seat belt when you think about it. Mm-hmm. , I mean people were so excited when they had to put their seat belts on, right? . But obviously seat belts save lives. They don’t think people would argue about that.

John Jantsch (20:31): Yeah. Yes. We don’t even think about it anymore. You get in the car and put it on. So, so who’s in charge of making this happen? Is it, you know, legislators? Is it medical communities? , I mean, you know, who takes the lead?

Gaia Bernstein (20:45): I think it’s a move. First of all, it’s a movement. It’s already taking place. So I think it has different parts and part of it is legislatures, part of it is lawyers. I think parents are taking an important role here. Mm-hmm. , they are suing for class actions. But I think they have a big role of changing how schools use technology because schools are, have this policy of the more technology. It’s not just the schools, it’s the federal guidelines actually. Sure, sure. The more technology in schools, the better I think. Right. Parents can take a big part here. And the medical authorities basically, when do these science wars and from the, if we look at the food wars, tobacco wars, they end when you have an important professional organization like the American Cancer Association with cigarettes. Right. You know, make declarations or governmental authority that this thing is harmful. And we don’t have that. We have very partial recommendations from the American Pediatric Association or the World Health Organizations about screen time for kids and mostly for young, very young kids. So, so that’s, so I would say the movement has, there’s lawyers, there’s medical professors, the medical organizations, and there’s all of us who can also influence the norm. The people who have businesses, they can think about what business model they want to adopt. Yes. Do they want a business model based on time

John Jantsch (22:09): It’s funny, when my kids were little, it was the warning from the pediatrician was don’t let ’em watch too much TV. But now nobody watches TV anymore. Right. .

Gaia Bernstein (22:18): I beg my kids to watch tv.

John Jantsch (22:20): . Well, guy, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find more about Unwired and maybe more about the movement you’re suggesting and connect with you.

Gaia Bernstein (22:32): So gaiabernstein.com is my website and they could also find a book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere they buy the books.

John Jantsch (22:40): Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Well, again, thank you for taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Gaia Bernstein (22:45): Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (22:47): 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements 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 Henry Adaso, fueled by Coffee and Hip Hop. Henry is an award-winning marketing leader with over 15 years of experience, a former music journalist. He’s a natural storyteller and innovative marketer. He’s currently the head of marketing for CMEX USA and the author of three books, including his latest that we’re gonna talk about today, The Art of Messaging – Seven Principles of Remarkable Messages (Or How to Stand Out in a Noisy World). So, Henry, welcome to the show.

Henry Adaso (01:30): Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:31): So going through your background, I feel like you have a very colorful journey to how you got to hear . You want to give us a little kind of what’s been your entrepreneurial journey? It kind of brought you to this point. I’d love to hear a little more about it.

Henry Adaso (01:46): Yeah, John, absolutely. Colorful is the right word. I call myself an accidental marketer because I didn’t know that I was going to end up in marketing when I was a young boy in high school. I was the kid who used to annoy all of his friends by making my own kind of handwritten newsletter and then forcing my friends to endure my newsletter. So I, I always thought I was going to become a publisher, but to somewhere along the line, I noticed that they were kicking publishers out of the building because of this thing called the internet. And so I pivoted to digital marketing, and what I quickly realized was that a lot of the same skills that I had developed writing my own book when I was a kid and writing newsletters translated to marketing because it’s ultimately about storytelling. And so today I work as a marketer and I love it.

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so, you know, messaging obviously is a key part, strategic element of marketing. I, I’m, I agree with you, but I’d love to hear your take on why you chose to call it the art of messaging. Why do you feel it it is elevated to the level of art?

Henry Adaso (02:52): That’s a great question. I think that people are intimidated by messaging it. It’s something that is often thought as a reserved for a select few copywriters, marketing gurus, great communicators. But it’s really an art. It’s an art in the science, but it’s primarily an art. And it can be taught, it can be learned. And what I realized looking at a lot of different brand messages is that they tend to have certain things in common. They have certain attributes in common. There’s a pattern that occurs. And if you study that pattern and try your best to recreate that in your product or service, if it works, it has to work. It’s not about something that doesn’t work. If you have a product that truly solves a problem, you can learn from the best brands on how to message in a way that truly resonates with your audience.

John Jantsch (03:45): Where, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, we’ve got this company and we’ve got, you know, we’ve been around for X amount of years, and we just feel like we’re copying what everybody else in our industry does, I mean, where do you first send somebody to look for, like, where is your message? You know, like where is it hiding? You know, the secret sauce that’s gonna really make a difference.

Henry Adaso (04:04): There’s a great quote by Michelangelo that says, every block of stone has a sculpture in it, and it’s the job of the sculptor to find it. So every brand, no matter the industry, whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s something that is interesting about your brand. And sometimes you may have to dig a little bit deeper, maybe do some research, talk to people who’ve been there a little bit longer. But you really have to try to understand the essence of your product or service or your brand. And that’s where I would begin. So for example, there’s a sock company called Bombas, and they sell socks, which, you know, could be consider the commodity, but they’re very successful because their product is tied to this idea that the, one of the most essential pieces of clothing that, that you really need is something that keeps you warm. So like socks, right? So every time you buy a pear, they gift one to, uh, somebody in need. So that’s a story, and that’s something that’s interesting that makes them, it kind of takes them beyond the idea of just being a soft company to now something bigger than that. And that’s really where you start. What is the essence of your brand? What is the thing that really makes you a little bit different from the others?

John Jantsch (05:17): You know, one of the things that I find is I think there are a lot of companies out there that they are unique. They are doing something different. Their customers, you know, stay with them because they are doing something different, but they still tend to talk about what they sell. How important is it to understand the problems? You’re, so you really solve for your customers, even if they’re the little things. I mean, I think that’s sometimes where people get caught up. They think of this messaging being this grand thing that’s gonna make us sound, you know, really important and amazing when their customers will say, well, yeah, but it’s, this is what you actually do for us. I mean, how important is it to understand the problems you’re solving?

Henry Adaso (05:58): I’m a marketer and I’ll be the first to admit, we love talking about ourselves. , we love talking about how great we are, how great the product is. It’s a very, it’s a comfortable space to be in to talk about how great the product is, but the customer is really interested in one thing. And that is, what can you do for me? So what we have to do is shift our messaging from a We Messages, which is focused on how many awards we’ve won, how great the company is, and shift it to a you messages, which is how do we talk about the customer? Every opportunity that we have, we need to be saying, let’s talk about you. What problems do you need solved? And the thing that resonates the most is if we can show the customer that there is a transformation on the other side of that conversation, on the other side of that interaction, we’re more likely to engage them and we’re more likely to be effective with our messaging.

John Jantsch (06:50): Yeah. And obviously with a Title seven principles, you know, we’re gonna break down a little bit of, of framework, but I’ll tell you a question I get all the time, and I’m sure you do as well when you talk about this topic, is the company that says you, you used bombass, you know, sells socks, which is a commodity. But you know, what if I sell just a really boring product, I don’t know, let’s say cement for example, know anybody who does any messaging for, you know, a product like that. I mean, how do you turn something kind of sexy maybe that just people don’t think is?

Henry Adaso (07:22): So I happen to know a thing or two about selling some given that’s primarily what we sell. And it, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the, just on, on the surface, it’s one of the most boring products. It’s literally just a gray powder, right? in, substitute the bags and it’ll look the same. So how do you make that interesting? A couple years ago we started this tradition, I’ll tell you a quick story. And we, at the end of the year, we would create a holiday newsletter and we would send out a holiday newsletter to our customers just as a, as an an expression of our gratitude for their business. Over the course of the year. The first time we did this, it was a very standard holiday newsletter. There was nothing special about it. It simply said, you know, happy holidays, it was beautifully designed, content was great, but we didn’t get much of a response.

(08:07): So we switched it up a little bit. And the next year what we did was we gathered all of our sales folks and we created this theme around football, and we had them hold up props. So footballs, helmets, trophies. And we also wrote in the newsletter, little fun facts about them. So this helped personalize our sales folks. And this newsletter had trading cards that you can tear out . And so if you’re a customer, you received this, it was, it’s not your usual cement newsletter, right? And then now you have something else to help you connect with that salesperson because they’re a person, right? That got a lot of great feedback from customers. The following year we did a similar theme, but this time with superheroes. And the same thing, dozens of customers wrote us asking for additional copies of our holiday newsletter, which is a marketing material, right? So, so here we are in a world where there’s so much noise and most customers are saying, I just get outta my inbox. I don’t wanna hear from you, but we have the reverse where they were saying, can you send me more copies of your marketing materials? All we did differently was tell a story. Mm-hmm. . And a story is something that always resonates. So I would say for something, someone who may be thinking, I have a boring product, I mean a niche space, just try to tell a story.

John Jantsch (09:28): Yeah. Yeah. So you, I have a framework that I think you probably refer to it as “best” because that’s what it’s spells, B E S T. So you wanna kinda unpack that. These are like the kind of some of the key elements. The good message has. You want to kind of go through that framework.

Henry Adaso (09:44): So I looked at about six years ago when I was working on the agency side, I looked at a, a lot of brands and they had, that had great me. And I started to study them to understand what they had in common, because I wanted to replicate that for my team. We had lots of clients that needed messaging. And what I realized was that all of them had these four attributes in common. They, it just kept coming up over. And the attributes are, they’re bold, remarkable, messaging is empathic, it’s specific, and it’s transformative. And so those four attributes spell out the word best, which makes it easier to remember. Mm-hmm. . And so a bold message is something that makes you stop and look. It’s something that earns your attention. It’s something that is engaging. And that’s the first question we have to ask is, in a noisy world, how do we make people stop and pay attention?

(10:42): An empathic message is simply something that incorporates a core human need in the messaging. So what is the emotional need that we’re solving for? Is it peace? Is it joy? Is it relief from pain? Is it I’ll help you make more money, spend more time with your family? What is that emotional driver? And then specificity is about understanding that nothing is for everyone. And we need to be clear about who the product is for and what it is as well. Because sometimes you’ll be driving and you see a billboard and you’re wondering what are they selling? Right? , at that point, you could have earned attention. So we have to be clear about what’s on offer and who it’s for. And then the last attribute transformation is really showing what the outcomes would be for the person. People don’t buy features and benefits. They buy the transformation. And so if you are, if you have something that helps people make more money, well the transformation is not that they’ll make more money, that might be a benefit. It’s what the money brings them. Mm-hmm. , it’s time with your family, it’s, Hey, maybe I’ll be able to pay off grandma’s mortgage or travel more. That is more likely to connect us.

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(13:30): So, you know, I’m imagining a group of folks sitting around saying, okay, yeah, this, that’s a really bold message. And we’re talking about like the transformation and you know, we spelled out exactly what we do, but then you take it out to the market and it’s like, I don’t get it. Right? I mean, how do you kind of test to the point where you’re like, yeah, this is, you know, how do you know? How do you know you’ve nailed it with, you know, the ideal client you’re trying to impact?

Henry Adaso (13:56): I encourage all marketers to take testing very seriously because the market knows best. And sometimes we will have, you may have a hunch or maybe you have some best practices based on experience, but when you test it, you might discover something different. So think testing is the first place I would go. And one easy way to test is through email marketing. So you could maybe test your headline and the way this works, most email platforms allow you to do this. You would have two different subject clients and then you would break your audience into two and send one subject line to one audience and the other to the other group. And you’ll study this over the course of two to four hours to see which subject line yields more opens. That’s how you pick a winner. So that’s one relatively affordable way to test. Uh, another one would be to run ads if you have, if you’re already running some ads, try different headlines and see which ones are generating more clicks.

John Jantsch (14:56): Yeah. Yeah. And increasingly, you know, some of these tools, particularly the tools that are trying to sell your ads, you know, will actually, you know, show you a winner. It’ll, you know, it’ll produce the winner for you because that’s the one that’s making them the most money. So consequently it’s the one they want to want you to land on.

Henry Adaso (15:13): Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (15:15): How important is it for an organization to have kind of a central message or a core message? You know, something that really delivers the brand promise first. Obviously there’s messages for campaigns, for products, for divisions, for different types of clients, but how essential is it to have something that brings together, like, this is what we stand for?

Henry Adaso (15:35): Consistency is credibility. So it’s very important to be consistent with your messaging across all of your customer touchpoints within the organization. If you have sales and marketing and customer experience delivering different messages to the marketplace, that is a perfect recipe for market confusion, right? So we wanna mitigate that by creating a source of cohesion for our messaging. And this could be something as simple as having a value proposition matrix that is available to all of your touchpoints. What I propose in the book is a messaging menu. And so your messaging menu has different servings of your messaging, starting with the starters, which could be something like an elevator pitch or your smaller plates, which could be something like your social media posts or entrees as I call them, which are longer messages when you have a presentation, what is your messaging? But they’re all part of the same core message. They’re all part of your value proposition. And so over time, if you deliver the same message consistently, then it becomes clear what you stand for and what your brand is all about. And then when people are ready to make a purchasing decision, they know exactly to turn to you.

John Jantsch (16:54): So you have a couple, um, exercises, I guess you called it. Somebody could actually, again, as an organization, you know, go through the one, I might have this wrong, but the, is it messaging tower or is that how you refer to it?

Henry Adaso (17:05): Messaging tower. So the messaging tower. Tower, yes. So that that, that is a tool that allows you to extract the most effective messaging points, the most important attributes of your product or service. And the messaging tower essentially is saying that there is a hierarchy when it comes to messaging. So at the base of your messaging is going to be your features, and these are things like descriptive elements of your part. Mm-hmm. the service. So if we take a headphone for example, maybe it’s lightweight or the color or the base production, those are all features and they’re descriptive and features appeal to a technical audience. Then at in the middle of the tower, you have your benefits, which is what can it do for me? So for this sticking with the headphone example, it may be something like, hey, it’s portable or it has noise cancellation. So it allows me to have peace of mind when I’m on airplane. At the very top of your messaging tower is the transformation. And the transformation is the powerful why behind your product or service. It answers the question you,

John Jantsch (18:12): You’re just gonna look damn good. Right? Exactly. . So by talking about this in a hierarchy, I mean you’re kind of suggesting that like all these things, if you gotta have, you gotta understand the features and what, how those translate to benefit before you’re gonna get to correct. What may be the most important part, the transformation is that right?

Henry Adaso (18:32): Absolutely. Really the cream of the crop is the transformation. If you can get to the transformation, you have a better chance of connecting with your audience. The example that I always think about is Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. So I noticed that their messaging was, hear music the way your favorite artists hear music. Mm-hmm. . And that is a transformation because at the time there, there were no premium headphones that could do what Beats could do, so, so the messaging there was about you having that proxy experience to the celebrities that you like and look up to, right? Versus they didn’t talk about the features, they didn’t talk about the benefits, they simply went for the top of the messaging tower, which is a transformation. There are lots of brands that do this effectively and cite several examples in the book as well. But when you start, once you see this messaging tower, you start to see it all over the place. You see billboards that are doing this. You see commercials that are doing the same thing. That is the most powerful type of messaging, the messaging that says, Hey, here’s how your situation will be different after you buy this product or service. Great.

John Jantsch (19:41): Well, Henry, I wanna appre, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can find your work, your book, uh, connect with you in any way that you’d invite them to do?

Henry Adaso (19:51): Absolutely. You can find me on my website, henryadaso.com or on LinkedIn. It’s going to be Henry Adaso or Instagram at @henryadaso as well. John, thank you so much for having

John Jantsch (20:02): Me. You bet. No, I’m, again, I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Henry Adaso (20:09): Look forward to meeting you in person. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (20:12): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Morra Aarons-Mele. She’s a host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. You might recall she was on this show for one of the best titles ever Hiding in the Bathroom . But she’s back with another book we’re gonna talk about today, The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower. So, Morra, welcome back.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:28): Thanks, John. It’s good

John Jantsch (01:29): To be back. So leadership and mental health, uh, in the same sentence, I mean, is juxtaposed even, are we talking about a bit of an oxymoron here?

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:38): No, we’re talking about,

John Jantsch (01:41): I mean, people don’t typically think about those two things I know is the whole point of what your, what your work is about. But, so help me kind of work this idea that, that you’re putting those two type topics together, you know, intentionally.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:55): Yeah. I don’t think that there should be any false separation between the discussion of leadership and mental health or to that matter, mental illness. Yeah. You know, it’s a part of life at anyone’s part of life. They will probably experience mental ill health and hopefully mental wellness. Right. It’s, it’s exists along the spectrum and we all go through it, and it’s part of our leadership and how we show up. Sure.

John Jantsch (02:18): I don’t disagree at all, but the fact that you’re having to talk about normalizing this in the workplace, there’s a lot of really built up angst about it, isn’t there? I mean, just the, you know, go back a generation and you never talked about mental health issues, right. It’s like that was, you know, that was taboo. And so a lot of people are dealing with that baggage, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (02:39): I, I think so. Even today, you know, we, um, we conflate mental illness or ANGs or depression with weakness, right? We, we conflate it with characteristics that seem to go against what we want our leaders to be and stand for mm-hmm. . And so of course there’s no incentive for leaders to talk about their mental health because everyone is afraid that they’ll be judged. Right,

John Jantsch (03:00): Right, right.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:02): And that’s the kind of stigmas they’re trying to break.

John Jantsch (03:04): Yeah. And I think when we use the term mental health, you know, obviously people go a lot of places with that, you’re narrowed in on this idea of anxiousness, you know, which mm-hmm. again, you talked about a spectrum could be in this, not a little of nothing. And the point that you’re making is that this is like, this can be a strength, right? I mean that this idea that you’re an achiever doing this, so, you know, it hasn’t always been seen as a good thing. So how, what, what are you bringing to the conversation? You know, that’s gonna help people see that as No, that’s a strength of yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:36): I hope people understand that leadership and anxiety go together because , when you’re leading, you’re going into the uncertain. Yeah. And a lot of anxiety is about facing the uncertain and the uncomfortable, even scary feelings that we have around that. You know, what leader is an anxious Yeah. And indeed, when we think of our, our greatest leaders before battle, when we read history, we understand that they were full of fears and deep, deep insecurities before battle. The key is moving through it and being able to go into battle.

John Jantsch (04:09): Don’t you think though, a lot of those leaders that you mentioned, you know, this insecurity came like after the fact, or at least admission of the insecurity came after the fact, but they felt like, no, I’ve gotta put on the, I’ve gotta put on the face, you know, and don’t you think a lot of leaders take that? Like, I, you know, even though I’m dying inside, you know, I can’t let that show .

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:28): Some do, some don’t. I mean, when you read histories, for example, of Abraham Lincoln, he walked around with great melancholy and anxiety, and he didn’t hide it. In fact, he built a team around him of people who could take care of him even in his lowest hours.

John Jantsch (04:44): Do you feel like there is more anxiety today? Maybe this is just a guess , but more anxiety today? And if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it in it appears that there’s more?

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:59): It’s, I mean, it’s hard for me to know. I’m not a right, I’m not a data scientist, but I do think that when you look statistically, the numbers of people reporting anxiety and depression in this country are overwhelming. And certainly among our young people, we’ve been through a period which has been really damaging to our mental health. Yeah. And I don’t see much that is making our mental health shore up right now. Certainly on a global scale. And even just from a macroeconomic perspective, things are very, very uncertain and scary. And that’s when we get

John Jantsch (05:31): Anxious. I mean, and, and we talked about like what we’ve gone through, but even now, as we continue home, I mean, is that actually making the issue, uh, worse or sustaining the issue? Uh,

Morra Aarons-Mele (05:40): It’s hard to know, right? I mean, I think the, the jury definitely is not out there. I think for a lot of people working from home makes their anxiety feel better because they may have less social anxiety. Yeah. Right. There may be fewer instances. On the other hand, anxiety loves a communications vacuum. And when we’re all, and we’re communicating on slack and strictly in audio, we may have more anxiety because we’re not clear on what our counterpart wants. We may feel the need to control and we’re micromanaging more. So it’s hard to know, but I think there are pros and cons. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:14): So obviously you spend a great deal of time in the book, not just explaining the people have these anxieties, but transforming them, you know, to being from a, from a what was maybe at one time a weakness, uh, to a strength. So what’s, what’s the process that somebody might, uh, go through? Because I, you know, I’ve spent 10 years, uh, meditating just to get rid of stress and anxiety. Uh, and now you’re telling me, bring it on.

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:37): No, look, I’m not telling you bring it on. I mean, if, if, if you found a way to dissipate it, amazing. Good for you. Um, you probably have a lot to teach

John Jantsch (06:46):

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:47): Because ultimately what you’re doing when you’re meditating is you’re sitting with thoughts and you’re just sitting with them. You’re observing them, you’re noticing them, but you’re not holding onto them.

John Jantsch (06:59): Right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:02): And what has that process taught you?

John Jantsch (07:04): Uh, that reality is far less scary than than, than, uh, the, the assumed, uh, reality, which I feel like is the creation of a lot of anxiety.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:16): That’s right. Anxiety is all about the assumed reality , right. Anxiety is our brain’s threat appraisal system going into high gear. On the other hand, our brain may sense a real threat or it may not. Right. And so many of us, myself included, spend so much time anticipating threats Yeah. That we almost forget how to calm down. Right. And then along the way that anxiety becomes our activating energy, it becomes our oxygen. Yeah. It pushes us forward. And we can’t separate what’s anxiety and what is our true drive for excellence. And it can really, really have intense consequences. And so in the book, I do a lot of what you probably do as a meditator, noticing when your anxiety pops up in what circumstance, how your body feels.

John Jantsch (08:04): Yeah. It probably gets a bit habituated Right. Too. Like we stop mm-hmm. noticing it becomes of when X happens, Y is going to occur in my body or in my head, . Um, and, and so you’re right. I, the first step probably is actually witnessing it to some extent, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (08:20): Yes. And anxiety’s tricky. I spoke with someone the other day and, and he said, you know, my anxiety shows up as vertigo, huh. And I was like, wow, that’s unexpected. You know, there’s a detective work process that you have to go through sometimes because we think that we know an anxiety hits and it’s that classic sort of fight or flight and our heart starts racing. Right. But always like that. Right. And, um, the thing that’s interesting about work is it gives us a lack. We can pick up a lot of patterns for our anxiety going off mm-hmm. if we pay attention

John Jantsch (08:49): Mm-hmm. . So do you have a framework, if we wanna call it that, to to, to that you’re actually can coach you through, you know, here’s, I didn’t know every individual’s front, but do you have, at least for how somebody might go through this transformation to turn it into, as you said, a I think a I think even superpower somewhere,

Morra Aarons-Mele (09:07): , I mean, in this book, I’m not a, I’m not a clinician or psychologist, but I draw on many different schools of psychology and research and you know, I mean, I think that the general consensus, like you said, is that when you feel like your anxiety is getting in the way, the first step is to notice it. Yeah. Really understand how it’s showing up, what it’s feeling like in your body, naming it, I’m anxious, I’m really anxious before this negotiation, what’s going on? And then doing the work to understand it, right? I mean, that is the work that we all do, but it can be really, really illustrative. And in the book, we look at everything from your childhood hurts mm-hmm. , those patterns that mo may go very, very deep to recent job experiences to, again, habits that you get stuck in. You know, so many of us get stuck in what I call thought traps. Mm-hmm. , right? Those negative instant thoughts. When we feel anxious specifically about something that we feel might shame us, our brain goes to a place of, I’m not worth it, I’m stupid, I’m gonna fail. Right? And that becomes a comfortable habit. Perfectionism is the same thing. And so it’s really about understanding and playing detective, and then trying to figure out what’s motivating the anxiety.

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(11:56): There was a book a few years ago, and I don’t remember if it was really even very good , but the title got my attention was called Stress for Success. And the main point that the author made was that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Um, I mean, is there any of that, um, thought, uh, process, uh, in anxious achiever?

Morra Aarons-Mele (12:21): Yeah. I mean, the neuroscience will will show that, right? I mean, we need anxiety. It keeps us alive. So if you are, um, faced with something that you really care about, that you feel might be a test, um, that you feel you really want to take a leap forward mm-hmm. , and there’s a risk of failure, of course you’re gonna feel anxious. You need to feel anxious.

John Jantsch (12:42): So what, what is the right word? But the, again, a lot of scientific research is really going in body connection. You know, what physical manifestations, you know, are, you know, are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:03): Well, we like to get into habits, right? Mm-hmm. . And, um, our brain creates habits as a way of hoping to dissipate the anxiety. So a lot of us, when we’re anxious, we may go into familiar behaviors, right? A lot of us may reach for a drink, we may reach for Netflix, we may reach for TikTok mm-hmm. , right? Mm-hmm. , we may exercise. Some of our coping mechanisms are what’s called adaptive. Mm-hmm. , they help us and some are maladaptive mm-hmm. at work. We also have anxiety habits. We may get into micromanaging. When you’re anxious, you feel out of control. It feels really good to try to reassert some control. And that could mean calling your team and bothering them . Right. It could be overwork. And so the important thing is to see how you’re reacting to the anxiety and ask yourself, is this really, is this serving me? And that’s where the mindfulness comes in again.

John Jantsch (13:56): Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. Is

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:57): This serving me? And sometimes you might say, yes, I am anxious right now. This is serving me.

John Jantsch (14:03): Yeah. So when it comes to, you talk about leadership and obviously typical leader, you know, manages people. So in some cases, teams or multiple teams. Are we at a point where, you know, a true leader now should be coaching around mental health, even though, you know, obviously not providing, you know, therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached around it.

Morra Aarons-Mele (14:30): I mean, this is a pretty controversial topic as you can imagine. Yeah. And it’s new, it’s really evolving, you know, in the field of workplace mental health. I, I say that, um, n no manager or colleague should ever feel like they need to be someone’s therapist. You know, that is not your job. There are a lot of programs that are helping, especially managers become conversant Yeah. In talking about mental health. Right. So that you can at least there. But you know, in part of the research for the book, and in my podcast I’ve interviewed many HR leaders and you know, their general consensus is your job as a manager is to listen and facilitate. So you wanna be someone who’s safe to listen to. You don’t need to solve an employee who’s having a mental health challenge. Right. That’s not your job. You can facilitate where they need to go next. Yeah. And I think that that is sort of maybe can help managers relax a little bit. It’s not your job to be the therapist.

John Jantsch (15:20): Many people in managerial positions are, you know, look a lot like me age-wise, um, and, uh, they are managing people who look a lot like my kids. Is there a a real challenge, you know, cross generationally? It’s

Morra Aarons-Mele (15:35): So funny, every time I say yes, I get people writing into me saying, no, it is not about generation. , you know, I think it’s really, really individual. Yeah. There are many people of certain ages who’ve been through a tremendous amount of therapy and their own healing journeys. Yeah. And another thing that’s interesting that I have heard anecdotally is that people who are, who have power tend to be more open and more willing to talk about things like mental health. Mm. And people in the start of their careers as well. It’s the people in the middle. Yeah. The people who are just holding on for dear life. Right.

John Jantsch (16:12): And this is just like another black marker possibly. Right. Well,

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:15): This is just something they just, they just feel overwhelmed by because they’re in the climbing phase of their career. They probably have a very busy home life.

John Jantsch (16:22): Yeah. Yeah. I have just anecdotally maybe millennials, maybe Gen Z, you know, tend to just be much more open about it. I mean, so the stigma appears to be gone of saying, you know, on, on Facebook, you know, my therapist said, you know, which Oh yeah. 20 years ago, you know, would’ve been somewhat, you know, it would’ve been with your girlfriend and a couple glasses of wine maybe. But that’s about it. Right. Um, so is that, is that just a social change or is that, you know, a positive change for, for good in, in the entire issue?

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:55): I think it’s hugely positive. I mean, I wish everyone could have a therapist. I think it’s a truly remarkable experience. And obviously there are a lot of barriers to getting good mental healthcare in this country. Yeah. Um, but I love, I love when people are open to talking about the road to self-awareness the same way they would as developing any other skill. Because what this comes down to is self-awareness as a leader. Yeah. And self-awareness is one of the most sought after an elusive leadership characteristics. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:25): I’ve often said, I think it’s the, it’s the, you know, super powerful leadership. I think, you know, because that, you know, where people really, when when people struggle with that, you know, then they give people answers and they , you know, they try to hold on to power themselves and you know, not, you know, not give it out. I mean, the most self-aware leaders wanna rise everybody up and they want, you know, they wanna share, you know, with the team, which are all I think very positive, you know, types of things.

Morra Aarons-Mele (17:52): Yeah, yeah. For sure. So

John Jantsch (17:55): If, if, if somebody reads this book and they’re a leader and they say Morra, we’d love to work with you. Do you do any work inside of organizations? Um, because this is, this might be hr, has certainly might be leadership, it’s definitely culture side of organizations. So where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change the culture, not just an individual leader who’s trying to get better?

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:22): I mean, this is really about culture change, you know, and I think the good news is as leaders change, culture changes, I don’t think that this kind of reduction of stigma around mental health in the, in the workplace should be seen as a perk or a nice to have or something we’re doing for the Gen Zs to keep them happy.

John Jantsch (18:38): It’s an AppRight or something, right? . It

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:41): Is actually foundationally about working better mentally healthy workplaces Sure. Work better. Absolutely. Where people, you know, have boundaries and treat each other kindly and can have open communications. I mean, it’s kind of the, the shangrila that we’re all looking for. So all of this stuff is actually foundational to anything you’d learn in a basic leadership or seminar. Right.

John Jantsch (19:02): But as you just pointed out, particularly when it comes to culture, that’s not something that you put on a plaque. I mean that, you know, that’s gotta be, you know, that’s gotta be lived and it’s gotta be lived a lot and it’s gotta be repeated and um, you know, before people believe it. Especially if you’re trying to make a change. You know, I mean, I think that’s the hardest part. You know, you’ve grown to 200 people and you know, they have accepted the organizations a certain way. Um, you know, changing that, you know, is really difficult, isn’t it?

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:32): It’s absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing we’re all working on. That’s why podcasts like ours exist. Yeah. Yeah. . But, you know, I’m not, I’m not saying that change has to start with a single person because we all live in systems, but I do think if you’re feeling anxious at work and it’s getting in your way it’s worth looking at. It will lead you to a path of discovery.

John Jantsch (19:51): Yeah. If nothing else, you’ll be happier. Right? ,

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:54): That’s, well, there you go. .

John Jantsch (19:56): Well, Morra, it was great having you back on the show. You wanna invite people where they can find, I know the book will be available everywhere, but, uh, where they might connect with you as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele (20:04): Absolutely. I’d love it if you listen to my podcast, The Anxious Achiever, wherever you get your podcast. And, um, if you have a question for me, reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll write back. Just send me a message.

John Jantsch (20:14): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

(20:19): Thanks.

(20:20): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcast.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Louis Gudema. He is a fractional CMO for B2B companies and mentors, startups at MIT. Previously, he founded and grew a marketing agency and pivoted into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in the national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named one of the best marketing plan books of all time by book Authority. He also does a little side hustle as ghostwriter of business and marketing books. But we’re gonna talk today about the second edition of Bullseye Marketing. So Louis, welcome back to the show.

Louis Gudema (01:38): Hi, John. Great to be back. Good to see you

John Jantsch (01:41): Again. So every time I have an author on, oh by the way, I also should have should point out because I’m certain he’s listening that Douglas Burnett wrote the Forward for this new edition with the, uh, marketing book podcast. I, he tells me I’ve been on like six times. He’s better about that stuff than me keeping track of. But whenever I have second,

Louis Gudema (01:59): He’s telling me that you were, uh, very close neck and neck for his most, his champion for most

John Jantsch (02:04): Episode, his most episodes by one author. So I always ask second edition books, authors, why’d you write a Second Edition? What was needed? What’s new , you know what? Because obviously that it’s a lot of work to do and to update a book. So there had to be some compelling reason, I’m guessing, that you felt it needed an update.

Louis Gudema (02:25): Yeah, it turned out to be more work than I expected. So the reason I wrote, and Douglas was very encouraging, even two or three years ago, he was like, you should do a second edition. So I’ll have to ask him someday why he thought it needed improving . But first of all, the first edition was B2B and B2C, and this edition is exclusively B2B. And I, that’s really my expertise. That’s where I do, you know, almost all my work. That’s where most of my experience is. And so I really wanted to focus on that. One of the things, and I have two or three others I’ll quickly say, but one of the things is that I think B2B marketing especially lacks creativity compared to B2C. So I populate the book and tried to make a real effort to show how people, and give a lot of examples from a lot of companies of kind of really creative and excellent B2B marketing.

John Jantsch (03:13): Yeah. And I actually wanna dig in, dig into some of those differences a little bit. But uh, go ahead.

Louis Gudema (03:18): Yeah, so another thing is that I laid out in the first book that the three phases of the Bullseye Marketing approach, you know, and the first is to take advantage of your existing marketing assets for fast, inexpensive results. Secondly, use intent marketing. And thirdly, I called cast of white or net and I renamed it a more accurate scientific correct phase, which is build your brand and grow your mental availability. Because what I’ve learned between the two additions is much more of the research that it turned out really validated by bullseye approach and the real importance in the long term of the third phase of building mental availability. And I can explain what that is. Yes. And it’s something that in this era of short-termism that, that so many marketers are focused on, what can we do with this campaign? What can we do this quarter that they’ve, they miss out on the long-term growth that can be achieved through those phase three programs, which is equal to, or even greater than the, those short-term

John Jantsch (04:32): Programs. I, I was gonna bring up the phase approach cuz it’s one of the things I really liked from the first edition. I know it’s back in this and I think that I’ve been, you know, for many years talking about, you know, I call it the customer success track in my last book. That, you know, there are there certain things that have to be done first, can be done first. Maybe it’s the low hanging fruit or it’s the foundation, you know, but it’s then what’s the promise of what’s next and the promise of what’s next. And I think you maybe don’t call it the same thing, but I think there’s a little bit of that same idea. The long game, you know, goes on while the short game is played as well.

Louis Gudema (05:05): Yeah. And I realize, you know, the first edition I thought was kind of focused on people who weren’t really experienced marketers. And then it turned out some very experienced marketers like were saying this is really great and very helpful. And so there the first phase is both a foundation for success in the second and third phases, but it’s also, you know, in and of itself, it can produce a tremendous result just in three or six months.

John Jantsch (05:34): Yeah, yeah. Like here’s an idea, send an email occasionally to your 1,237 customers that haven’t heard from you. Right.

Louis Gudema (05:42): , well it, that was, so bullseye marketing grew originally from the fact that I was working with companies, you know, as a fractional CMO and things that were supposed to be like the best, you know, like inbound marketing or social media posts or other things, you know, they wouldn’t produce results in in three or six months. No. And I thought, well, what really does produce results? And that’s when, you know, bullseye Marketing grew out of that. And also from my experience as you know, I’m sure you’ve had work, I would start to work with the new client and I’d say, oh, how many email addresses, you know, do you have? And they’d say, oh, we have 12,000 or, you know, whatever the number might be, right? And I’d say, oh, how often do you, you know, email them? And they’d say, oh, around the holidays,

John Jantsch (06:31): ,

Louis Gudema (06:31): And, you know, email is marketing is such a tremendously powerful, you know, and almost free tool. And yet they weren’t taking advantage of it. And so that’s where the idea of the marketing assets that were kinda like money that people had in the shoebox under the bed, you know, and they just had to use it better.

John Jantsch (06:50): I had a client one time that, that we were doing a monthly newsletter and he was like, you know, that’s just a pain. Let’s just kill that. I just, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore. And I was able to show him spikes in web traffic, spikes in conversions, , you know, every single time that thing went out. He was like, okay, I get it. I get it. . Yeah. So it’s awesome. Hey, you know, speaking of conversions, I also like your thinking on this. You know, a lot of times I have said before on stages that, you know, if you dropped me into your business and you said, look, you’ve got, you know, a couple weeks, what’s like the one area you would work on? And I always say it’s sales or conversion , you know, rate optimization. Cuz you, most of the time nobody really focuses on that. You like tweak the dial one half a percent and sometimes, and it can really drop to the bottom line. Can it, so you have, you talk a lot about conversion rate optimization. So tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.

Louis Gudema (07:46): Oh yeah, I mean it just makes a huge difference. You know, it, it’s just the idea is so simple is it’s way easier to double your conversion rate with the existing amount of traffic than it is to double the amount of traffic with the existing rate of conversion. And it, when you double your conversion rate, which you know can, it’s one of those, another one of those almost free things. Yeah. You know, you’re not only getting twice as many leads or sales or whatever your conversion is, you’re cutting the cost per conversion in half. And, and sometimes it’s, it’s really obvious stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, I I like to say that if you start to ramp up your marketing without first optimizing your for conversions, yeah. It’s like trying to full a buck fill a bucket that’s full of holes, you know, you’re just wasting a huge amount of your time and effort.

John Jantsch (08:42): Yeah. And I’ll throw one more variable in there. You get lead conversion cranked up, raise your prices , and you know, it may cut into conversions a little bit, but you know, it’s pure profit in many cases. So, you know, it’s worth the take worth taking a look at both of those, I think in a combination.

Louis Gudema (09:01): Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:03): Te tell me a little bit in your experience, um, the, what you see as the significant marketing differences between, you started already alluding a lot of B2B businesses, you know, the marketing’s very boring and because they feel like, oh, it has to be very professional or something. But talk about just the significant differences between B2B, not talking about like the tone or the messaging, but the, you know, the significant like channel differences even or approaches to, you know, a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer.

Louis Gudema (09:33): Well, and I’m gonna talk about the leading B2C companies, the p and gs and those Yeah. Right, right. Cause they, yeah, they do it so well. And there are some great B2B markers like Salesforce, you know, which really gets it also, and I give other examples in the book. But what they realize is that you have to build this idea, uh, of mental availability first of all. And that means that customers, it starts with the recognition that 95% of your market is not interested in buying from you today. Right? So it doesn’t matter what you say or what you offer, you know, they bought it six months ago, or they have a vendor they’re happy with or they, or it may be a, you know, if a, a firm has an accountant, a law firm, you know, some other, uh, service provider that they’re very happy with, they’re just got not gonna switch.

(10:28): If they bought a new crm, you know, two years ago, you know, they’d have to be really upset to switch, you know, and that’s true just of many things. The typical consumer insurance customer stays with the same company like Progressive or Geico for 11 or 12 years. And you know, and that’s the case in the B2B world too. So mental availability is building up awareness so that you are top of mind when they do want to actually buy something in your category. Because the short list is often very short. And one, sometimes just two companies, you know, I, I have in there a study in the book where someone, an analyst was surveyed their customers, their clients who had just bought new digital asset management systems. These are big enterprise expensive software system. A majority of the clients had looked at one vendor, they had done no competitive bake off at all.

(11:27): And I hear that all the time from small company, you know, companies that are selling to SMBs, you know, that they are, you know, someone hears good things about the MailChimp or about HubSpot or about Constant Contact and they’re like, they look at it, yeah, looks good, let’s go with it. And they don’t spend, you know, three months doing a competitive bake off. And if you aren’t, if you don’t haven’t built up that mental availability over the previous months and years, you don’t know about that opportunity. All the search marketing in the world and email marketing in the world will not make you aware of that opportunity cuz they’re just not gonna talk to anyone. They’ve already settled before they bought it. And so you wanna get yourself, and this is what, you know, this is why p and g and companies like that, you know, you look at the Today Show and they do their 15 second ads and it’s just to constantly be, you know, maintain that aware that mental availability, which is more than awareness, so that when you are ready to buy, when you are ready to switch, you are the one they’re thinking of.

John Jantsch (12:31): You know, I can already hear listeners saying, well, that’s great, p and g has billions, you know, somewhere, you know, how can I afford, you know, how can I invest in that type of, you know what, maybe people would’ve called brand marketing or something at one point. How can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it, you know, scientifically,

Louis Gudema (12:53): Well, I compare it, I like to make this comparison, John, brand marketing and building awareness is like exercise, you know, it’s well documented that people are healthier and live longer and live healthier, right. If they exercise, you know, five times a week, right. You know, half an hour a day, not a huge investment, but you know, if they do that they will be much healthier and live longer. And that’s like brand marketing. You know, it’s not with exercise where you can say, you know, last Tuesday I ran a 5K and that’s what made me healthy, or I got X return from it . Right. You know, it’s the doing it constantly over and over again at the same time, you know, in terms of medicine, you know, when you got an emergency, you get a, you know, chemotherapy, you get surgery, you get your covid shot, you know, those have great short-term effects. They may even save your life, but they don’t produce long-term health and wellness. And so you need ’em both. And what the researchers, what the studies show is that optimally you have a roughly 50 50 balance and spend between brand and lead generation.

John Jantsch (14:04): Yeah. And I can attest to the fact that having that long-term approach, whatever it is, however, you know, shows up, doesn’t, it’s not always running ads, you know, on the Today Show that having that brand mental availability, brand awareness out there actually makes your marketing your short-term marketing more effective. I have found. So in other words, you know, we’ve invested for years in inbound. That’s just part of what we do. I produce content, we’re on social media, I speak on stages, I do webinars. You know, those are all kind of things that in many cases are just kind of getting the name, keeping the name out there when we then decide there’s something we wanna promote and we put ads behind it. I can tell you anecdotally, but I, you know, probably could go do better than that, that we have people all the time saying, yeah, I read Tape Marketing eight years ago and then I saw your ad and it just reminded me how awesome it . You know, I mean, it, it, you know, I, again, I th I I think it’s really testament to the fact that they support each other. I think it’s not just like for the long term someday.

Louis Gudema (15:05): Oh, sure. So are you familiar with Gusto? The Oh, okay,

John Jantsch (15:08): Sure, sure. Actually, my, my, my daughter has done a lot of marketing with them or my daughter’s firm. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (15:14): Okay. So I quote the former CMO of Gusto, she was the CMO when they grew from 500 to 50,000 in customers. Yeah. So hugely successful. Now she’s the ceo. That’s what you get when you go from 500 to 50,000. You get to be CEO next time. Yeah. And of Mutiny a marketing AI firm. Ah, and she says that at Gusto, she found that whenever she turned off the brand marketing, six months later, their customer acquisition costs, their CAC went through the roof and their conversion rates tanked. And, you know, she tried it. She ran the, this experiment and other companies, Adidas found the same thing in B2C, you know, six or seven years ago, they said, oh, we’re just gonna do this, you know, digital lead gens, you know, online sales stuff, we don’t need the brand marketing. We’ll leave that to Nike. And after about three or four years, they said, oops, you know, they found out. So a lot of companies have found out in a lot of different industries that just exactly what you said, brand supports LeadGen, and you need ’em both, you know, hand in hand.

John Jantsch (16:30): This is a

Louis Gudema (16:30): Say, just one other thing, and they are fundamentally different. Yeah. Yeah. And you might even need different people or different agencies doing them because the brand is all about creative and emotion and characters and humor

John Jantsch (16:44): Message. Yeah. And

Louis Gudema (16:44): The lead gen is all about rational, 10% off sign up for our webinar conversion optimization stuff. So they are very different skills. And you may need different, you know, groups of people doing them.

John Jantsch (16:58): 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 slash certification.

(17:46): And now, word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot CRM, get realtime data at your fingertips so your teams stay in sync across the customer journey. Build better content, generate more conversions, and get the context you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale. All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface sets you up for success from day one. So you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today.

(18:35): If this next question were part of a drinking game and you had to drink every time somebody asks a question about this right now, if we all wouldn’t be getting much done, but where are you, where, what’s your take on AI in marketing these days?

Louis Gudema (18:49): Uh, I think it’s very new and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. I actually was sitting, you know, I, until last month, I headed up a group in Boston that you’ve spoken to sales and marketing innovators. And we had a speaker today on AI in marketing, and he was making a point. So first, all the writing I see from AI today, I think is very bland and mm-hmm. Undistinguished. Yep. But who knows what it’ll be like in two or three years. But he was saying that, you know, what AI does is it brings in a huge amount of internet content and, you know, and then it generates new things from that. Now, LinkedIn itself, the LinkedIn B2B Institute says that 75% of the ads on LinkedIn are in a, and as we’ve been talking about, most B2B ads are not very good. So if you’re using an AI that’s taking in all the mediocre stuff that’s being done today and creating new things based on that, I don’t think that’s what you want. I, you know, and I think that to the degree that AI is valuable, marketers have to be better than AI or, or we won’t have jobs.

John Jantsch (20:01): Well, you know, at least what I’m telling people right now is it’s an efficiency tool. It’s a research tool. So, you know, you may ask it’s something and get 20 ideas where you would’ve thought of 10 or something. You know, I’m with you. I mean, it’s certainly not at the cut and paste stage by, by any means. Boy, I tell you, it does a good job of outlining things. It does a good job. Metadata is a perfect example. I mean, you know, for SEO purposes, keyword research for SEO purposes, it just speeds. You know, it gives us a lot of speed and efficiency in doing some of those routine tasks. And I think that’s how, if we use it that way and free up sort of those, the mental capacity, you know, to think strategically, I think it, it certainly has a place today.

Louis Gudema (20:44): Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s great for brain, you know, brainstorming and you might get, you know, 15 or 20 ideas and you say, yeah, that one, you know that that might be a good topic. Although I heard, uh, I saw on Twitter, this guy at this agency said that they were doing a branding campaign and they asked Chad g p t and it came up with, you know, like 10 15. And then, so they immediately tossed all those out as being the obvious banal things. And their job then was to find the new innovative approach that something like ChatGPT wouldn’t come up with.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been using it a lot for some strategic research too. You know, you develop a persona and then say, you know, what are the 20 concerns that, you know, this persona might have when buying X Service or considering X Service? And, you know, I have to say it, you know, it, it is probably the common stuff, but it just, you know, it’s, it create create in that particular case, it creates a nice framework for, you know, maybe we ought to be messaging around a few of these. Yeah. So let me shift gears a little bit. You are an author of a great book, bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with and for other folks, really, truly for, I suppose, as a ghostwriter, you, you wanna talk a little bit about your decision to do that? I find it difficult because it’s so much work to write a book. I can’t imagine writing somebody else’s book.

Louis Gudema (22:11): . Well, you know, they have to pay you to do it

John Jantsch (22:15): .

Louis Gudema (22:16): So I can help you on that part of it. So yeah, after I wrote Bullseye Marketing, I contacted a few publishers, and the thing is, I’ve been a, a ghostwriter, if you wanna call it that. Well, that’s for my entire career. Right, right. I’ve written for, you know, I’ve written for CEOs, I’ve written for clients, you know, campaigns, I’ve a hundred page manuals and videos and, you know, I’ve written for clients my entire career. So this is just a, a different form of writing.

John Jantsch (22:42): Different package, huh? Yeah. A different package. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (22:46): Yeah. And so I, I let a few publishers know, and last year one of them contacted me and said, yeah, we do need someone to write a marketing book. And it was an interesting topic. It was B2B, but it was not an area I had done a lot of work in. So it was kind of interesting. And I, I could learn the author and I got along very well. He liked, you know, what I wrote, and that helped us get along well. Right. . Um, so now in that case, I did not have a credit, and now I’m, you know, talking with a, another author who, where I would be a co-author on the book. So yeah, I am interested in doing that. And as I said, it’s kind of a, you know, it’s something I’ve done for a long time.

John Jantsch (23:28): Well, you know, ChatGPT, they’re, you know, just have it spin out books for you and then they’ll be very profitable. Right?

Louis Gudema (23:35): I think so , I think if I can just have ChatGPT write it all in the background, it’ll, you know, and I can do about 20 or 50 at a time.

John Jantsch (23:44): Yeah. , like who are some of those people? Patterson, James Patterson, that spins out, you know, like eight books a year. But I guess he’s, I guess he’s just hired an army of people that can work inside of his sort of framework model and write. Oh, is that what he does? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. So that’s why he, that’s why he’s so prolific.

Louis Gudema (24:03): Well, Stephen King does is outrageously prolific with his novels. Yeah. I think he ha does something like, I, I read his book on writing. I think he has a goal of something like 2000 words a day.

John Jantsch (24:16): Oh, wow.

Louis Gudema (24:17): And so, you know, he sits down every morning, writes his 2000 words, and, you know, that’s,

John Jantsch (24:23): That’s how

Louis Gudema (24:24): You, he has another very

John Jantsch (24:25): Long, how to say that that’s how you get to eight, 800 pages. Right.

Louis Gudema (24:29): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (24:30): Although I will say Bullseye Marketing is no thin work there either. It’s, uh, I think you’re with the index, you’re over 400 pages and in that book and it’s really, you know, I don’t know if you see this as a compliment or not, but I think it’s a, I think it’d be an amazing textbook just because you cover so much ground and you do it in, I think in very practical ways.

Louis Gudema (24:49): Well, thank you. I have, I had a, a one reader in their Amazon review of the first edition called it an encyclopedia. Yeah, yeah. Of marketing. It’s, you know, when I kind of picked it up to do the second edition, I was like, this is ridiculously ambitious . But it’s funny you mentioned that cuz when Douglas Burett interviewed me, you know, five years ago on the Marketing Book podcast, he started off by saying, so I weighed this and it weighed 1.5 pounds. So I were you, it wasn’t what I thought was the most notable, but apparently it is longer than those

John Jantsch (25:28): Books on top of pages. You, I don’t know who, you know, Wedgewood Press got the paper from, but I just think it’s, I think it’s just a bulky, heavy book in general compared to a lot of other 400 page books. So it has something to do with the weight of the paper. I think even,

Louis Gudema (25:43): Well it’s got over a hundred full color illustrations.

John Jantsch (25:47): Well that too. Yeah. Did the first tradition, I’m forgetting, did the first tradition have color? Oh, okay.

Louis Gudema (25:52): And so, you know, wanted high quality paper.

John Jantsch (25:55): Yeah, yeah. Well you accomplished that. Well Lewis, thanks again for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people to connect with you and find out more about Bullseye Marketing in its various forms.

Louis Gudema (26:07): Yeah, so, so the book will launch on May 2nd. I’m not sure when this will drop, but either, you know, right. Presumably

John Jantsch (26:17): It’s May 2nd, 2023 I should say. Cuz people listen to this show years later.

Louis Gudema (26:22): That’s true. May 2nd, 2023, the ebook can be advanced ordered, but the physical book for some reason cannot. But you can buy it May 2nd and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or louisgudema@gmail and would love to, you know, communicate with any of your, uh, listeners.

John Jantsch (26:42): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road, Lu. Thank you, John. Be well. 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christina Inge. Just two decades of experience leading digital strategy and management and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results. She’s the founder of Sleek Marketing, which offers hands-on education on digital marketing in the Boston area, and she’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics and Data to Optimize Marketing Strategies. So Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Inge (01:34): Thank you John for having me here.

John Jantsch (01:36): So here’s my first question. When you use metrics and strategies in the same subtitle title, most businesses I end up running up against don’t have a strategy, let alone a data-driven strategy. So, so how when you’re talking to somebody about this idea of a data-driven strategy, how do you bridge that gap if they really aren’t working from a strategic framework anyway?

Christina Inge (01:59): I think most people, even if they’re not working from a strategic framework, either believe that they are, yeah, , or know that they are not and wish to do so. I have yet to meet anybody who says, you know what? I hate strategy. I wanna just fly by the seat of my pants day in and day out. I’m sure they’re out there, but mercifully or unmercifully, I have not met them. . So the first thing is, there’s really not a lot of resistance to the idea of having a strategy. People don’t have one, but that’s all the more reason why they want to have a strategy and why they turn to data. Because if you don’t have a strategy right now, half the time, if not 70% of the time, you believe, rightfully so in most cases, that the reason you don’t have a strategy is because you don’t have enough. And data is really just information. Yeah. So most of the time people are like, yeah, I absolutely need a strategy and I need the data to develop that strategy. And datadriven strategy is like the buzzword of the moment. Sure. So people are for the most part on board with it, especially if they don’t currently have any kind of strategy at all.

John Jantsch (03:11): So, so you know, well, a lot of times when you work, what I hear you saying, I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, I’m gonna ask the question, is that a lot of people figure out what they’re gonna do and then say, let’s figure out how to measure it. And what you’re in some ways saying is, let’s look at what the data tells us to figure out what to do.

Christina Inge (03:29): Yes and no. So you should be always making data driven decisions. You should probably not be making decisions just based on gut feel or the mood of the moment. And I’m just, uh, swinging around here to be slightly less backlit, although I have that angelic look here going on. So you should be looking at the data to have it help you decide what to do. But you should also be conducting experiments. You should be doing ABM multivariate testing to test out hypotheses about what you should be doing. I’ll give you an example. So you can look at the data for what worked six months ago in a space like consumer, I don’t know, health and beauty, right? But what was on trend six months ago, what was on trend three months ago is not necessarily what’s on trend now. So if you go at that, go and look at that data and say, well, these particular influencers were really productive for us, or this kind of subject line in our emails or our marketing automation was very productive. It is not necessarily going to be the case right now. So I say, yeah, look at the data, but don’t just retroactively look at the data and then proactively predict forward. Well, predicting is a forward looking thing. Pride forward what you’re going to do, use that as a guide. But the past is only one of the many guides to what you should be doing. You should also be actively experimenting.

John Jantsch (04:55): One of the complaints of course, that I think people, uh, have today is there, you know, 20 years ago there was only so much you could measure today, lots of data, lots to be analyzed. So I mean, probably too much, right? In some cases. So how do we kind of get to what’s the important stuff?

Christina Inge (05:16): Anything that’s related to ROI is what you should focus on. I’m gonna say there’s three things you should be focusing on. One is anything related to roi, because at the end of the day, you’re either in the business of making money or if you’re a nonprofit, you’re in the business of serving a particular mission. And then your roi, it may not be monetary, but it’s gonna be there in elephants saved or disease cured or what have you. So you need to first and foremost say, am I doing things that help us meet our mission? Whether it’s shareholder value or saving elephants? Is this email campaign? Is this social media campaign, ad campaign, this combination of things, this customer, are any of these things helping us actually achieve that mission? And for that unique KPIs, key performance indicators that tell you, well, how will I know that we’re succeeding?

(06:07): So that’s the first thing, and I’ll get back to the issue of KPIs in a moment, but I wanted to also talk about, all right, what are the other two things that are help you narrow down to the metrics that matter? Not everything is gonna be a direct driver or even a quantifiable driver of roi. So for instance, if you have an outstanding, if you do a rebranding the way Campbell Soup recently did a rebranding, maybe more soup’s gonna fly off the shelves, maybe not. Maybe it’s gonna give them a little bit of a bump. But rebranding, people often don’t do it with the view towards all this is in and of itself, right? Going to cost people to stamped and buy my product. So you also want to measure consumer perception, your own positioning in the marketplace. And that takes it a step above ROI to the overall health of your branding your company.

(06:54): And then finally, if you wanna think about it as a Venn diagram where ROI is here, well may encompassing mo that mostly your brand health is here. Then the biggest circle of things you need to be measuring is your industry. You want to think about looking ahead to trends. Don’t forget, when you think about building a blue ocean strategy, one of the ways in which you can carve out a blue ocean for yourself. And if that’s not a mixed metaphor, I have no idea what, so we’re carving out an ocean and leveraging the ROI and running it up the flag pole. Oh my word. That’s way George jargon for a Monday afternoon is, which is when we’re recording this, but one of the ways in which you can create a blue ocean for yourself is by anticipating trends, right? Being ahead of the curve. Now, of course, the idea that there’s always a first mover advantage has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, that paper got retracted and cringe whenever anyone says first mover advantage. Cuz it’s not that simple. Sometimes there isn’t, sometimes there isn’t. But what you can’t afford to do in this world is be utterly oblivious to emerging trends. And instead simply being reactive or trying to be proactive, but only being proactive with a narrow time horizon. So time horizon A, look at your ROI of what you’re currently doing, time horizon B, look at the health of your brand and then the big time horizon start metricating overall industry trends.

John Jantsch (08:25): So on top of too much data, another thing that I hear quite often is this idea of attribution. How do I know exactly what did what, because the customer journey’s a little all over the place, . So are there some best practices in even assigning attribution or guessing or dividing attribution amongst channels?

Christina Inge (08:51): There’s again, three things there that I tell people to focus on. One is, on a tactical level, you want to have a tagging system in place. Mm-hmm. , like if you are not on a very basic level setting UTM parameters, or in some ways actually tracking all of your marketing efforts, start there, right? Gather that data. People will say, well, we can’t measure this or that because it’s on a third party. Yes, you can. Maybe not perfectly, but yes you can. So get the mechanics of measurement down. But a bigger challenge for a lot of people are the two other big things with attribution modeling. The first is simply having an attribution model and understanding what those are. A lot of times people have been doing analytics for quite some time, but they have no real clear idea of the differences between different attribution models like first touch, last touch.

(09:45): Mm-hmm. data driven of course, is very big for anybody using Google Analytics or many other platforms Right now we’re just gonna tell you what we think your attribution is and that’s fine. But you should still be able to manually set and explore different attribution models. So you instinctively understand how to map a customer journey and know the differences in attribution. If you attribute things to what we call first touch, which is the first interaction someone has last touch, last interaction, and so on and so forth, like equal credit to everything, those are really gonna give you dramatically different pictures of your customer journey.

John Jantsch (10:25): So, and Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, if you wanna finish that point, cuz I’m gonna move on to completely different,

Christina Inge (10:33): Oh well really quickly. The biggest part of customer journey mapping that people leave out is empathy. You want to have an ability to put yourself in your consumer’s shoes. It’s not just the data, it’s being smart about the data.

John Jantsch (10:48): Hmm. Say more about that. Okay. How, how are you, how do you end up being smart and build empathy back into the data?

Christina Inge (10:55): Well, the nice thing is that there’s a couple of tools out there, and in case anybody’s wondering what the movement is over my shoulder here is I’m being photo bombed by my dog, . Hi Kelly. Say hello to the people. Yeah. So we are one of the favorite tools that I like to use. I am shocked by the number of people who don’t start every marketing effort with personas. People will talk about these great groups of customers they have like, oh, millennials for instance. And I often use this example, in fact, I’ve used it in other podcasts. So I’m, I wish I had something completely original to share with you, John, but it’s a favorite analogy that I like to use. I will, when I do this, when I do my class at Harvard for instance, or at Northeastern, I’ll put four pictures up first I’ll say, okay, do you wanna reach, let’s say teenage girls, parents with large numbers of kids, people who travel with their pets and LGBTQ millennials and everyone’s like it.

(11:52): Totally. And then I put up a picture of a teenage girl and it’s Joan of Arc, and I put up a picture of a person with a lot of kids and it’s Genghis Khan . And then the guy traveling with a bunch of pets is Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and the LGBTQ millennial is Alexander the Great and I say, are any of these folks gonna buy your gum or your frozen dinner service? No. But what would they all buy? Oh, armor. Yes, they would buy armor or I don’t know, catapults or whatever the heck you needed. I don’t know what Hannibal needed to cross the LPs, but I dare say armor was part of it. Swords spears, they’re in the market for those products. And so one of the things that happens when you don’t have personas is that you lump people together by demographics or by a specific buying behavior that may ha be no indicator of who they are.

(12:45): Because I tell you right now, Joan of Arc is not buying your car insurance from you or your lip B and try selling anything to Genghis Khan. Mm-hmm . So the point here, being an A persona is a really good way to take that vague abstraction of your, you know, millennials with two kids or whatever, and actually think long and hard about whether you’re sell, whether they’re buying what you’re selling. The next thing that I really love to do, it’s called an empathy map. I don’t know if you’ve used one of those in the past, or I’m sure several of the listeners have love empathy maps. There’s some really great templates out there, but they help you dig into how is your consumer feeling in the moment? Yeah. What do they,

John Jantsch (13:29): What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they saying? Right? Right. Exactly. Yep.

Christina Inge (13:34): And that takes that persona who is still a two-dimensional figure, and you are right there with them and you’re understanding what they need. Like, gosh darn, I wish I had a catapult at this moment.

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(15:23): So what role, because you do consulting, what role do consultants have in really bringing data more to the forefront with their customers? So a lot of marketing firms out there, yep. Say, oh, you want a website or you want leads, you know, we’ll get you that. But they’re not really, they’re certainly not leading or pushing a client to be more data-centric.

Christina Inge (15:44): Think the role that consultants plays a vital one, because we’re often perceived as more objective. And I would say arguably we often are, and that helps us look at the data without knowing so much of the backstory that we aren’t willing to consider certain things. So going back to my favorite analogy, if you’ve been trying to sell pet beds and you’re not selling them and you think, oh, we need to redesign the pet bed, and I come in with my crew and we say, no, the reason that your pet beds aren’t selling is because your target customer has an elephant, we are the ones willing to speak to the quote, literally or figuratively, usually figuratively elephant in the room, right? And say, okay, the fundamental assumptions here are wrong. We can do that from place of emotional safety. That’s part of it. I think the other vital role customers play is again, that fresh perception, which comes down to the fact that we can conduct data audits or other inventories or even just questions asked about what kind of data are you collecting and identify gaps that people have learned to live with.

(16:51): I mean, I’m a lifelong Bostonian and I can tell you that when people come to town, they’re often absolutely shocked about how much we live with potholes. We’ve gotten used to it, we take it for granted. Oh yeah, the streets are filled with potholes, whatever. And it takes an outsider to say, wait a minute, the streets are filled with potholes. Now mind you, I can’t go out and fill those potholes. So it’s, the analogy falls apart, but the point here being, it often takes that external perception to tell you what’s actually happening beyond just sort of puncturing those common assumptions, which people often desperately want you to question, but you are also actually asking, well where’s the state of com coming from? That’s very

John Jantsch (17:36): Valuable. All right, so I’m gonna, we don’t have all the time that it will take for you to answer this next question , but I’d just

Christina Inge (17:43): Like to

John Jantsch (17:44): , I’d just like to you to weigh in on the changes in privacy. Certainly tracking, certainly the data we get. You know, obviously everybody’s familiar with, you know, the Facebook, you know, tracking that’s gone or behavioral, you know, attribution that have gone away. Where do you see that, whether we know where it’s going or not, what do you see that businesses need to be doing? Because, you know, it’s not as easy to get some of the data that we used to get,

Christina Inge (18:10): You know, don’t, I can actually answer this pretty quickly because I would say it’s two things. One is double down on your own first party data, right? Make sure that you’re doing data audits, making sure your data is ethically collected. In other words, it’s fully opted in and make sure it’s clean. I guarantee you most people’s data is not as clean as they’d like. It’s kind of like your refrigerator, your fridge is never as clean as you’d like. Neither is your data. The other thing you want to do is start going old school, in my opinion, which is figuring out what are the proxies for the data that you can no longer collect. I mean, even Google is using predictive modeling to fill in the gaps that are resulting from people opting into integrated privacy protection, whether it’s legally mandated or not. What I mean by that is I’ve been in marketing long enough that I remember when you had to target people by the magazines they read and those kinds of targeting where you’re targeting people by a self-evident, self-selected and self-identified interest are not bad. And we have to get back to thinking like that. To go back to my analogy, if you are trying to figure out what you can sell to Hannibal Alexander, the Great Joan of Arc and Genus Khan, if you were forget their age, forget their other demographics, if you were targeting all of the, the readers of, or Facebook, well I’m that old that I actually refer to Facebook, Facebook fans or Instagram fan fans of Catapult monthly

John Jantsch (19:41): .

Christina Inge (19:42): You would be getting your target audience and you’d be doing it in a much less invasive way because you’re partnering up with media outlets that have already reached people. It doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter what they are, what matters is what they want to buy from you or what cause they want to support or activity they want to engage in. Go where it’s self-evident that the crowd you’re gonna find does that, that data is out there and that data tends not to be as tightly regulated, nor is it as ethically questionable. So

John Jantsch (20:12): Go back, yeah, you, you know, everybody’s locking down on the online data, but you can buy a lot of data. You know, I can buy a mailing list of just as you said, people that read a certain magazine that have maybe a certain ailment. It is pretty, pretty crazy. And so I, I mean, I, I think what you’re suggesting too is app pending customer data with some of that, uh, external data might be a way to build, uh, a richer profile or persona.

Christina Inge (20:37): I, I have my own moral reservations about when and if you should be doing a pending, you can certainly do that and it will get you a lot of that data, but if you don’t feel comfortable, so a pending customer data would mean I’ve got a list of 20,000 of my customers and then I go to a data broker and I find out how many of these people are into canoeing, right? Or chain mail or whatever. That may still be something your consumer doesn’t want you to do about them, but if you, again, partner up with folks who have already found your audience because they self evidently need to congregate around a certain media property that I think everyone feels comfortable with. But you know, that’s a line you have to decide yourself organizationally, append is an option, but so can partnerships, so can good old fashioned advertising or media partnerships or inf more contemporary influencer partnerships can be a way of getting around that data privacy as well in a way that’s maybe a little bit more comfortable.

John Jantsch (21:35): You and I are recording this in March of 2023, Google Analytics, which is a, I would suggest a core tracking piece of data gathering by July of 2023 is changing its model completely and certainly its interface completely. Do you, what are you telling people about GA4 today?

Christina Inge (21:55): I actually am quoting my friend Chris Penn on this one. Chris is telling people that you should already be on GA4. If you are on uni, you know, if you’re on Universal Analytics that’s going away and you’re gonna lose your historical data because you are gonna be stuck with switching over in, I don’t know, July or whenever you’re gonna be forced to do. So you could do it maybe even now, but you’re already then, but you July it’s going away. So I don’t know if you’re planning on doing it anytime soon, but do it as soon as possible. Switch over so that you’ve got that historical data. Because what’s wonderful about GA4 is its predictive modeling. It’s gonna predict your, for instance, your most likely converters and it’s gonna need a nice rich data set to do that. So the longer you wait, the slower you’re going to be able to realize the great benefits of it and it’s gonna, you, you know, the learning curve, you just have to accept it and learn how to use this new platform and you’re gonna be happy you did.

John Jantsch (22:53): Yeah, I’ve been telling people you had to learn GA3 , so it’s just, you’re used to it. But we actually did that, we actually put the tags on all of our client sites probably a year ago. So we’ve been collecting that data, but we don’t have many of ’em that want to, you know, use the interface until they have to. But we’ve at least been collecting that data. So yeah, you definitely, and and you know, the myth that they might just push it back for six months, I think is people better probably stop listening to because they have no incentive to push it back. It, it is a free tool that they’re getting sued for using right now. So I guarantee it’s gonna happen on July 1st. That’s my permission.

Christina Inge (23:29): Even if it gets pushed back, you’re, you have nothing to lose because you’re still collecting the data.

John Jantsch (23:35): Yep.

Christina Inge (23:37): And that’s the point. So, no,

John Jantsch (23:39): You’re doing great. So Christina, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find certainly marketing metrics, but really even connect with you and your work?

Christina Inge (23:48): Absolutely. So you can find my book Marketing Metrics on Amazon and it’s, I believe the Kindle version is currently, I had a nice little discount as well of I think 20%. But don’t quote me because you, I don’t know when you’re gonna be listening to this. If you want to find out more about me, you can go to my, the website of the agency that I founded here in Boston in 2014. We are in our ninth year in going strong. And that’s thoughtlight.net thought as in thinking light as in light bulb, T H O U G H T L I G H t.net. And you can reach out to me there, you can find out a little bit more about our services or even order the book. And I personally answer all emails that are addressed to, Hey you.

John Jantsch (24:34): Awesome . So Christina, again, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Christina Inge (24:42): Thank you. Have a great day, John.

John Jantsch (24:44): 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 Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcast.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is David Newman. He is the author of the business best seller, doit Marketing and his new book, doit Selling. He’s the founder of the Doit MBA Mentoring program and the host of the Selling show, a top-rated business podcast with over 300 episodes, I think I maybe even was on once. It helps professionals twice, right? Health professionals, service sellers, land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. And that is what we’re gonna talk about today. Welcome back to the show, David.

David Newman (01:28): Hey John. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:30): So the name of your new book, Do it! Selling: 77 Instant Action Ideas to Land Better Clients, bigger Deals and Hire Fees. So when people hear the word selling , uh, you know, I often tell people, entrepreneurs that you know, half 50% of your job, probably at least in the beginning, is gonna be selling . Um, and yet most people, kind of, many people at least despise the word. Why do you suppose that is?

David Newman (02:02): I think it’s two things. I think it’s the way that we have been sold to mm-hmm as prospects, right? Because every entrepreneur wears the salesperson hat, like you said. And we also, in real life we’re also prospects and buyers of all kinds of things, right? And it’s also the way that they’ve been taught to sell by some of these big sort of franchise training organizations that have been doing this for 20, 30 years. And unfortunately doing it 20, 30 years, probably the wrong way. That sales is manipulative and pushy and there are scripts and you have to apply pressure and all of these things. So you take those two things together and it’s no surprise that most independent professionals certainly just hate sales. They hate it a lot. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (02:50): , I mean, some would just tell you that I don’t necessarily hate it cuz I know I have, you know, I’ve gotten over, I know I have to do it to survive. But most people will still tell you they find it kind of the hardest work they have to do. I mean, what do you suppose that is?

David Newman (03:06): I think they’re looking at it as different than the delivery work. So as, let’s say you’re an accountant and you love accounting, you’re a consultant and you love consulting, you’re a coach and you love coaching. If you look at the diagnostic process, once a client hands you a check, once a client hands you a credit card, you’re asking all kinds of questions, you’re digging, you’re probing, you’re uncovering, you really want to help them. Imagine if we just reframed the sales conversation as you’re very first delivery conversation. So there’s no pressure, there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing to prove, and you’re just having a human to human conversation about their situation and seeing if you can help them or not. So part of that also is our mindset that we cannot go after prospects like a hungry dog going after a piece of meat . So whether you need the business desperately, you need the business not at all or somewhere in between.

(04:07): We have to remain detached. And I like to reframe, and this is in the do it selling book. One of the first chapters is about reframing the word sales with two other words, invitation and conversation. And most people like invitations cuz usually there’s a party of some kind or bourbon or cookies or barbecue or something fun. And most people are also not afraid of a conversation. So a conversation is where you get to make new friends a conversation is where you get to learn things. A conversation is where you get to exchange ideas. If we reframed the sales process and each sales conversation as simply an invitation to a conversation, I think it would be a get a lot easier. And I think folks would realize they’re probably better at it than they think.

John Jantsch (04:54): Yeah, yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. Most, if most people realize that’s what it was, , um, they wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of it. Right. So I think you already answered this, but I was gonna ask you, you know, are there certain skills traits, personality traits, you know, things that make somebody better than somebody else at sell?

David Newman (05:15): Sure. Well, I think it’s not personality traits because someone argue, oh, you’re a born salesperson, John, you’re just great at sales and you somehow have the sales gene, or you had sales DNA from the time you were a small little tiny baby . I think the two skills that we need to cultivate, which every good trusted advisor has is to be strategically dumb and perpetually curious. Hmm. So all the things that, you know, whether you’ve worked with 10 clients or a thousand clients, you might think, oh, I know all the typical problems, I know all the typical questions, I know all the typical stuck points. I’m not gonna waste time asking this one prospect if they suffer that particular symptom or problem or condition. But I’ll tell you, you gotta be strategically dumb. Pretend that every client is your first client. Every prospect is your first prospect.

(06:08): And start asking questions from that place of being strategically dumb and perpetually curious. Perpetually curious by the way, means never take the first answer at face value. Mm-hmm . So I also talk about this in the doit selling book that we are so concerned with. Two things that we should not be concerned at all about. Number one, sounding smart. Number two being liked. If you are in a sales conversation and you’re very concerned about sounding smart and being liked, where’s your focus? Your focus is on you. If you are committed to being strategically dumb and perpetually curious, meaning asking lots of follow up questions, really digging and probing and uncovering and finding the symptom behind the symptom and the problem behind the problem, then the focus is 100% where it belongs, which is on your prospect.

John Jantsch (07:00): Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about stages of selling. You know, it’s just like a, any kind of customer journey. You know, people’s questions and objectives, you know, change in each other’s stages. So like prospecting, you know, is a common thing. I mean, we sometimes have to go out there and find people who might wanna listen to us, right? And then obviously the conversation can change to like, how’s this gonna work for me? All the way through the, well maybe before that trust building , you know, to, how’s this gonna work for me? How do you break down kind of the set journey or stages of selling?

David Newman (07:34): Well, so the demarcation, and I’m sure you get this question a lot of course as well, it’s like, well when does marketing stop? Yes. And when does selling begin? And certainly for independent professionals, that is a very, it’s a very smooth continuum. So you might think that you’re in a marketing conversation, but you’re actually in the sales conversation. If they express interest, if they have urgency, if they have really desire to fix this problem, sometimes you’re in a sales conversation and it turns out, you know what, they don’t have a need, they don’t have an urgency and it’s just a nice marketing conversation. That person may or may not come back later. But I look at the demarcation point, marketing is everything that happens to get the initial face-to-face, zoom to zoom, voice to voice conversation. Once you’re in that conversation, that literally is the beginning of the sales process.

(08:28): And depending on what we’re selling and how complicated it is or how expensive it is, you might be able to have a one or two call sales process. There might be five steps, six steps, seven steps. We sort of lay this out in the book that somewhere between three and seven steps or three and seven touchpoints is most of the sales conversations that folks that we work with end up with. We’re not selling satellites, we’re not selling complicated manufacturing. Technology is no such thing as a six month or a 12 month sales process for small and solo business owners. It’s just a question of can we get the information and can we share the information to build a level of certainty with that prospect that we can really solve their problem? And that starts with understanding and that starts with listening. And that starts with really probing and questioning to a deep level.

(09:22): I think a lot of folks make the mistake with sales conversations first. Sales conversations specifically. They keep it too polite, they keep it too surface level and then they leave it sort of open-ended saying, well great talking to you John, and you know, you know, call me back if you’ve made a decision or let me know when you’re ready. And they just circle off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. So I think having some discipline and having some linkages in that sales process, because as salespeople, when we put our salesperson hat on, it’s really a leadership role. So we need to set the guardrails and the boundaries of how this sales conversation is gonna go and one of the the key principles that will help people right away, never leave one sales conversation without booking the next sales conversation on the prospect’s calendar so that you’re always getting forward momentum.

John Jantsch (10:20): So you talked a little bit about the training that people have received over the years for good or bad. I mean things like overcoming objectives, closing, you know, or kind of common things that are taught in this. Do they still have a place into Do it! Selling?

David Newman (10:36): Well, so let me answer both the way that we have the sales conversation. There’s a sales conversation roadmap that’s in the book. It’s really meant to prevent objections in the first place. Usually an objection is some sort of surprise. So

John Jantsch (10:51): People say, I don’t have enough info. Yeah,

David Newman (10:53): Yeah, exactly. And they think that when they have a closing problem, it’s something that they screwed up at the end. Usually it’s something they’ve screwed up at the beginning or maybe in the middle. But if you’re not closing enough sales, you’re probably not opening the relationship the right way. You’re not having the initial sales conversations that would really diffuse and, and almost melt away all the typical sales objections. No time, no money, gotta check with my boss, gotta check with my wife. It’s not in the budget. We’re already using someone else. I mean, these are all the standard objections. If we’re asking questions about these things early and often, we will surface these obstacles and we’ll be much more prepared to discuss them and dissolve them as the sales process moves forward. As far as closing, I think a really human to human sales conversation leads to the prospect closing themselves, right?

(11:52): So here are the closing questions that are at the back of the book. And these are, I think our listeners will find these so tricky and so manipulative and so difficult. Here they are. . Well, John, does this sound like something that you’d like to do? John, what do you think about moving forward? John, does what we talked about so far makes sense, John, is this something that you’d like to do? It’s like, oh my God, he’s having a, like, this is like a waiter. Imagine you have a beautiful seven course meal. The waiter comes up to you at the end and says, Mr. Jan, would you like coffee? Would you like dessert? You’re not likely to throw down your fork and go, I can’t believe the sales pressure. What is going on? How dare you ask if I want coffee, if I want dessert. No one gets upset with those two closing questions.

(12:40): Why? Because they’re a natural extension of everything that has come before. So if we learn to have really strong opening sales conversations, surface the issues, get to the question behind the question, the issue behind the issue, the obstacle behind the obstacle, and then it comes time to, hey, we’ve had the value conversation before, the price conversation. I know what I’m solving, I know what I’m fixing, I know what I’m getting and I know what the investment’s gonna be. Would you like to move forward? Does this sound like something you’d like to do? Where would you like to go from here? These are all closing questions that let the fish jump into the boat.

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(14:56): So you mentioned price. That’s clearly an area that people get very nervous about a lot of times when they get asked that. In fact, I, you know, I work with a lot of professionals, consultants and it’s the area that trips ’em up the most. I mean they’ve, you know, I urge them to double their fees . And they say, well I could never get that. So, you know, how do you teach people to, to really kind of overcome that fear of price, which is a fear of rejection, a fear of like, I’m not gonna get the work. But you know, we’re given it away a lot of times by underpricing. And that’s really a function of just not having the right posture, isn’t it?

David Newman (15:33): Yes, absolutely. So I totally agree with you. Just like you, I encourage everyone listening to double your prices right now. , wait a minute, wait a, so let me write that down. Double my prices. The reason that this is important is, and I want to address some of those objections too. I’m gonna price myself out of the market, right? Well if you’re struggling, if you’re a consultant, you’re a coach, you’re a trusted advisor and you’re having a hard time selling at your current price, when you double your price, you will totally price yourself out of the broke market and you’ll start to price yourself into the premium market. And I sometimes ask prospects and clients the same question. I say, do you think over the course of your career, is it possible that you might have lost a couple of deals because you were too cheap?

(16:26): Yep. And almost without fail, they start telling me a story. Oh my gosh, I was talking to this company last year and I lost the deal and I went back to the buyer cuz we had a good relationship. And I said, what was up with that? Like what, you know, what decision criteria made you choose someone else? And the buyer says, well, you know, the price was just so low, it made us nervous. It made the c e o nervous, it made the team nervous it, it made me nervous that I really didn’t think you could solve my problem. And there’s always a story like that. So literally when you price yourself out of one market, or the common objection that we hear is, well my clients would never pay that . I’m gonna agree with you . They wouldn’t because you’re prospecting to the wrong clients. Right?

John Jantsch (17:12): Yeah, 100%. I mean it is, I, you know, I’ve seen it time and time again where somebody, they, it’s almost like what you described, like the person thought it was too cheap, it couldn’t possibly get the result, but you also just, you know, you double your fees and you just, you’re gonna have different, you’re gonna have conversations with different people and that’s, you know, that’s the real key. So, but it’s hard, you know, you’re thinking, can I take $10 today before I get the $20? You know, so it, it keeps people trapped it, you work with a lot of professional services folks. Are there unique aspects of, you know, that type of sale that you think need to exist where they might need not need to exist in a, what I would call a more transactional sale?

David Newman (17:57): Yes, absolutely. Well I think most trusted advisors, unlike selling widgets or unlike selling products, we are the product. Yeah. So we take the sales process and we take rejection very personally. , I think this is something where we need to reframe the mindset and the value that you’re delivering is where we need to focus the conversation. Not, I’m a great consultant, I’m a great attorney, I’m a great coach, I’m a great accountant. Of course you’re great. That’s table stakes these days. Wants to hire someone who is reassuringly expensive and has certainty that they can really solve the problem. Cuz they’ve solved this hundreds or thousands of times before. But because we are the product, when we’re in a professional services sale, and again John, I’m sure you’ve worked with these folks that are coming outta corporate, they’re like the top salesperson for at and t and they can sell corporate cell phone contracts till the cows come home.

(18:54): Now they’re a consultant and it’s like, John, I’m selling myself. It’s completely different what happened? Like I didn’t know this was gonna be different. And it’s completely different because we are now selling a personal transformation where the client wants to go from situation A to situation B. They want to either fix the problem or achieve a new higher level outcome. And we are the bridge, right? We are the conduit, we are the catalyst from where they are to where they want to go. That’s why, for example, all of the things that you teach about, you know what? You’re not the celebrity. The system is the celebrity. The methodology is proven and it works. And that’s why, you know, that’s why that level of certainty, cuz people really want two things at the end of the day, prospects, they want to know that you have a system, that you’re not winging it, you’re not making this up as you go along.

(19:48): And they want certainty that they will get to the outcome that you’re being hired for. So if you can anchor yourself in asking questions and having conversations about what they really want, what they’re trying to fix, what they’re trying to solve, and what are the radiant consequences. So the consequences of the consequences. What if you get this right? What if you get this wrong? Sometimes I’ll even, and this is also in the book as far as the detective questions and the go negative questions. What if you don’t do anything? What if this just continues going the way it’s going for the next six months? Uh, and at any point in a calendar year, you can also ask a prospect, well I’m curious if you look back over the last 12 months, what if your next 12 months looked exactly like your last 12 months with this problem, with this situation? Oh my god, that’s unacceptable. No, we have to fix this. So we’re uncovering just by questioning, we’re uncovering urgency and priority and the values through which they’re gonna make this buying decision. And you absolutely have to do that. Otherwise, you know, we’re pitching instead of asking and listening and so many times with a professional services sale, we actually listen our way into the sale. We do not talk ourselves into a sale.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times the best question you can ask is, tell me more about that.

David Newman (21:08): Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:08): and then just shut up. Right? And you know your point earlier about a lot of times they will sell themselves by just repeatedly. Tell me more about that, tell me more about that. And then finally they dig themselves in such a hole that you know, they’ve, you know, they clearly are like, you’re right , I need to fix this. Well, last question I wanna talk about, I’m that newish salesperson, or maybe my company doesn’t really provide pipeline. How do I go out there and start kind of knocking on doors without cold calling? I mean, how do I go out there and start? And I shouldn’t put words in your mouth. Maybe you’re gonna say cold call, but I mean, how do I start building some opportunities?

David Newman (21:43): Yeah, so fantastic question and I do wanna address this issue of cold email, cold LinkedIn, cold calling. There’s a huge difference between cold outreach versus initial conversation. People equate those two things where they will say, well John, I don’t like marketing because I really hate cold calls. It’s like there’s a million other things that you could be and should be doing besides randomly cold calling strangers. But let’s talk about initial outreach. What makes initial outreach immediately warm, even if the person’s never heard of you and there’s no preexisting relationship. It is three things. Number one, research. Literally spending 15 minutes researching that prospect, researching their company, going on LinkedIn, going on their website, going to their media page, seeing the press releases, seeing what they’re up again, seeing what they’re working on. So that’s the research and then coming on their radar with something that is immediately relevant to what’s happening today.

(22:41): So research and relevance takes cold outreach and makes it warm. So if someone were to, let’s say someone, and we get this on LinkedIn all the time cuz LinkedIn’s become a horrible vortex of spam. But let’s say out of my LinkedIn messages, I get the following, Hey David, I see that you’ve written two previous books and your brand new book Do it selling just came out. We’re an A and I’m totally making this up. You know, we’re an Amazon sales agency and we make sure that established authors who are launching a book get a really strong foothold with their initial book sales. Would that be worth a chat? That’s the message. So now I both, we’ve met both criteria. They’ve done their research on me. It only takes about 10 minutes to find that out about me or John or a, any one of your prospects, right? They’ve done the research, Hey, I see that you’re doing this right now at this moment in time. And then I’m not pushing myself on them. I’m simply asking, would that be worth a short chat? Now in my situation, and I think every author that’s launching a new book, I would talk to that person. Yeah. Is a cold call or is that intelligent prospecting? Right? Right. It’s intelligent prospecting because of the research and the relevance.

John Jantsch (23:52): Yeah. And you know, it’s quite obvious when somebody is, you know, attempting to do those things, but they’re, you know, completely inauthentic in doing it. So you know, everybody’s gotten the message, you know, oh, personalize it. But you can see when it’s done cut and paste style, you know, as opposed to taking the time. And it really, you know, as you mentioned, LinkedIn particularly has become so, so bad. I can’t remember the last time I actually accepted an invitation to connect, you know, because of how poor they were. But it’s easy to stand out there now because there’s so much garbage.

David Newman (24:26): the bar. You are so right. The bar is low, my friends, good news for everyone listening. The bar is low. All you have to be is be a better human. This is one of my early sales mentors. Maybe I’ll just leave this final comment for folks to think about. I was very committed early on to be a better salesperson. This sales mentor says to me, David, don’t worry about being a better salesperson. Be a better person and you’ll sell more.

John Jantsch (24:51): Yeah, yeah. Makes ton of sense. I mean, we wanna buy from people that we can develop a relationship. We can like, so tell people where they can find out. I know the book is available, going to be available anywhere you buy books, but where would you like to send people to get more information? I know you have some resources too that, uh, that they can acquire. Yes. Basically to connect with you as well.

David Newman (25:10): Absolutely. So doit selling.com is the global headquarters of the Duet Selling Empire. You can grab the book, like John said, you can download some companion resources, tools, video training that will help you implement the ideas in the book. And everything is waiting for you @doitselling.com.

John Jantsch (25:31): Awesome. Well, David, it was always a pleasure to have you drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

David Newman (25:40): I appreciate you, my friend. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (25:42): 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.