John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain, wherever you get your podcast.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest Clare Price. She’s the president and CEO of Octane Growth Systems, the systems, process and tools company that helps you take control of your marketing through smart execution. And she’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, Smart Marketing Execution, How to Accelerate Profitability, Performance, and Productivity. So Clare, welcome to the show.

Clare Price (01:23): Thank you John. Very nice to be here.

John Jantsch (01:26): So gimme a little bit about your, I gave kind of the bios scripted bio, but gimme a little bit of your backstory, your entrepreneurial journey. How’d we get to here?

Clare Price (01:36): Well, I started developing the system about 10 years ago. I released a series of what I would call playbooks about for small business marketing because you see, well first of all, I wanna say something why I’m so honored to be here with you , because I consider you to be the pioneer of small business marketing systems. And I think everything that I have in my book and what other people have done was really built on the foundation that you laid. And before I get into my stuff, I had to say that. So looking at that, about 10 years ago, I started seeing an issue with small business marketing. And that is a lot of small business owners lacked strategy. They lacked a ability to do, they got goals, whether they worked with a marketing agency or with a coach or whatever. They got goals and they dived right into implementing those goals. What I found was missing was that there was a gap between strategy and action. And I started looking at ways to help business owners close that gap. And that is what led eventually over the last 10 years, really experimenting with different approaches, different systems, to being able to develop something, which I believe right now anybody with marketing experience, a little bit of marketing experience can take the book and really learn how to develop a strategy for a smaller, medium sized business.

John Jantsch (03:16): Obviously you’re preaching to the choir here. I mean, I’ve said strategy before tactics probably 6 billion times in the last 30 years. But one of the challenges, and I’m curious how you’ve encountered this. One of the challenges I find is that you can say the word strategy to people until you’re blue in the face and they don’t really know what it means. And in fact, the part of the challenge is that if you Google the term marketing strategy, you will find a list of blog posts that basically 15 tactics will be listed. So how do you get somebody, do you differentiate between a tactic and what you’re calling strategy?

Clare Price (03:49): Well, the way that we do it is we’ve developed six canvases that focus on six core areas of business growth. And that’s brand development, brand power, customer acquisition, message clarity, market expansion, sales enablement, so marketing and sales working together and product marketing or product innovation. And the way that we develop strategy, I think is very unique for small businesses is we ask a series of discovery questions. And the way that we get to the answers of those questions is by having our clients work through a series of worksheets, assessments and tools. What that does, John, is that actually has them developing strategy while they’re thinking everything through. And at the end they do have a strategic blueprint for those specific areas.

John Jantsch (04:40): Right. So what have you found, and you have a section on this, so I’m gonna go there and let you kind of talk about it, but what have you found are some of the biggest growth killers, particularly for small businesses?

Clare Price (04:52): I think the biggest growth killer is the trial and error marketing churn and burn marketing going out. And imagine, I know you’ve had this experience, I bet everyone in your audience has had this experience where you, you gotta do goals. Okay, we’re recording this at the end of October, so everybody’s thinking 2023 planning. So people get into the room, it’s an offsite, maybe there’s great food, there’s pastries, and everybody settles into their chair in front of a huge whiteboard and there’s a facilitator, sometimes not, and they scribble furiously for two or four hours and the whiteboard is completely filled and everybody’s got their goals and their desired approach or the direction circled. And at the end of that exercise, the CEO or the CMO marketing director stands up and says, Okay everybody, let’s get it done. What happens then is everybody jumps outta their chair and goes and does what they know how to do, what is missing.

(05:49): And what we really focus on in smart marketing execution is looking at the alternatives. Not just jumping into the tried and true, let’s go do social media, let’s go do Facebook ads, let’s go do you know, video advertising or whatever. But let’s look at the alternatives for the goal that you wanna set or that you have set. And then we benchmark those alternatives using a set of data. And that data includes looking at team capabilities, looking at resources, looking at timeline, looking at budget. In fact, in my book in chapter nine, smart execution chapter, there’s actually a formula where you can benchmark the projected revenue minus the cost, divide that by the timeframe and come up with a growth score. And when you do that, you can actually literally using data show what is likely to have a better return on investment than something else. So that’s the approach we take.

John Jantsch (06:54): So one of the things that I certainly found early on working with small business owners is that I had my toolbox of traditional marketing things. But when you work with a small business, and you’ve alluded to some of these, I mean, you get into operations, what is traditionally seen as operations, maybe you get into what is traditionally seen as finance. I mean, how do you manage the fact that somebody is hiring you to do marketing, but you can’t really do marketing if you don’t get into every aspect of their business?

Clare Price (07:24): And that’s why one of the things that I’m doing with is developing what I call a ecosystem of right partners. And so if somebody does, I do see a finance problem, I do an operations problem, I have perhaps a fractional CFO that I can refer them to or a fractional business coach that can address that problem. And the key part of having the ecosystem is we work together. We don’t just hand off a referral and say, Okay, you go do your thing and then when you’re done, we’ll come start, we start marketing. We’ve worked really out the team and I’m really looking for preferred partners that, and some are already listed on my website that can be part of this ecosystem.

John Jantsch (08:09): And I actually think that’s a practice that more marketing consultants, more consultants in general ought to do. You know, think about all the various areas that every client you work with, whether they probably have an accountant already and they maybe have a coach, an executive coach. And I mean, I think all of these professionals that serve a client, wouldn’t the client be served better if we all work together

Clare Price (08:27): , Exactly. 100%.

John Jantsch (08:31): And it’s odd because they’re rarely done and sometimes what you might propose gets pushback from another professional. And I always pick on accountants cuz it’s so easy to do that where if they truly understood what you’re proposing, they might be behind it. And so I think it really, instead of being counter, it’s like you’re all working for the mutual good.

Clare Price (08:54): Exactly. And one of the things that we say that Octane is really a marketing operating system because we are not looking at it from a standpoint of just being, let’s find a program, let’s find a campaign and try it and see if it works. It’s a combination of strategy, execution, and in our case automation. So we will also look at the automated systems that are in place when you can explain to a financial professional or a business professional the idea of marketing from an operation sense, which is very common at the large corporate level, not so common that the mid-market level, I think they have a better understanding and I think they’re more willing to get into that partnership.

John Jantsch (09:41): Well, and I think that your growth score, for example, that you just mentioned, you know, take an account in the growth score and basically say, we’re talking about this investment because it will return x. I think that’s as opposed to, oh marketers just wanna spend money on ads. I mean, you’re now basically showing here’s what this investment is going to return. And that’s obviously, that’s an argument that’s gonna go a lot farther with a financially business owner, but certainly with an accounting professional, isn’t it?

Clare Price (10:11): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (10:13): So I meant to actually ask this a little earlier. You know, specifically have the word execution in the title of the book. How do you differentiate between execution and say planning?

Clare Price (10:24): The way that we differentiate it is that we call the planning of the blueprint, our strategic blueprints. And the execution is the roadmap. So the blueprint is how are we gonna build this? And the roadmap is once we know what we wanna build, how are we actually gonna get from where we are today to the destination? And the key part of smart Execution is actually building that roadmap out so that people are, again, not just doing what they know how to do or what they’ve scrolled on a napkin or a whiteboard, but we’ve actually, we do roadmaps for clients that are similar to customer journey, similar to a product development roadmap so that they actually can see month by month what their goal, goal is, where they’re going.

Jay Baer (11:11): This is Jay Baer marketing and customer experience, author, advisor, and expert. And I’m not just an occasional guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I’m also a listener. Why? Because in my estimation, the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is one of the finest business resources available in any medium. The guests are tremendous. John knows just about everything about marketing and business. And if you can’t improve your business after listening to this show for a while, I don’t know what can.

John Jantsch (11:43): So we do similar, have done similar kind of approach for years. And one of the things that often happens is there’s huge gaps, there’s huge things they’re missing, they wanna do it all. How do you help a business owner prioritize? Again, if they throw enough money at something, obviously everything could be a priority, but in real life, help somebody prioritize what’s on the roadmap.

Clare Price (12:06): And that comes into, comes, the gross score comes into that. And it also just in general, what the likelihood of success is, also what the urgency is. Those are some of the ways that we help them priorit. Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:20): You mentioned the accelerators and really there’s a good half of the book is really built on unpacking those. And by the way, great tools, worksheets in the book. I’m sure that we’ll at the end all invite you to tell people where they can find those in real life as well as in the book. But let’s talk about a couple of the growth accelerators. A lot of small business owners, when they hear brand development, all the brand kind of words, they either feel like it’s a bunch of fluff or it’s not for them, or they minimalize it. Say, Oh yeah, I’ve got a logo, that’s my brand. How do you help somebody understand the importance of brand development?

Clare Price (12:58): We have a tool as part of the Octa Grow system, as part of the brand accelerator called the value grid. That is my core tool that every client has to go through. And what it does is, again, it replaces the traditional, I will call it agency approach. Cause if you think about the traditional agency approach, what happens when you’re gonna do brand values, right? Again, everybody’s in that room, they throw a bunch of words up on the whiteboard, they circle the words, everybody agrees on the top three, five or seven, and they leave the room and the agency puts a sentence against them. That’s what I’ve experienced in my career. Yes. What we do is we have our value grid starts with those values. So same start, but we also define the value based on a dictionary definition. So everybody has the same definition of the value and they’re not self self-defining the value.

(13:49): Sure. That’s number one. Number two, we ask them why that brand is important to the company and we ask them to really give us a reason behind the value. How does that change the company culture? How does that change the customer experience? How does that really relate to the day to day employee experience? And then the fourth step is we asked them to give us the what, the why and the what. So how are you living that value every day in your business? And that’s actually put in a grid style with a lot of detailed information. And the values do come out of that. And then they’re tied to the company culture, they’re tied to the employee experience and they’re tied to the customer experience.

John Jantsch (14:39): I think people really underestimate, a lot of times when they think of brand, it’s like, what’s the public face? I think they really underestimate the internal culture of the employee experience because that’s really when it really, really comes down to it. That’s in, especially in small businesses, that’s how your brand is experienced is through your people. Absolutely. Probably less from your television ads. So really an important part that I think is missed often chapter five talks about, and it’s one of the accelerators, you talk about a message clarity. I find for a lot of small businesses, we have to actually start with message period. Because a lot of times it’s just like, here’s what we do. And it’s like a race to be the same. How do you help folks not just clarify a message, but clarify a message that matters that differentiates them?

Clare Price (15:24): So again, we use the message canvas, which is in the book, which has the six areas that we look at. So we look at, well, first of all, what’s the big idea? What do you really want to communicate? And the other thing I think that’s important, John, and I think this is the core big mistake that business owners make when they’re looking at their message, it’s a translation error. They know what they do, they know how they speak it, they know how they live it, but the customer doesn’t necessarily live and speak the same way the business owner does. For example, I had one client who sells software to 12 schools, and they had a real problem with their messaging because they’re an engineering company. They were selling to superintendents of schools, public information off, and a whole different culture of people with a whole different set of ways of looking at the world.

(16:19): And so they would come in with speeds and the school people were like, Well, we don’t understand this. What is this? So we ended up doing a lot of work on the messaging there to translate the true benefit, the benefit to the customer, the benefits that the customer was living day to day. And I think that’s the other mistake that a lot of happens with messaging is people go with a very surface message like, Okay, what’s our benefit? Okay, well our benefit is faster, cheaper, better, but what’s the actual lived experience, that person, that customer’s having? What’s gonna change the way that they do their business, live their life or live relationships? And then once you find that you find that real deep desire, motivation, then you can really provide the right message.

John Jantsch (17:14): After doing thousands and thousands of interviews with customers of our customers, one of the things that’s become very clear to me is most businesses don’t understand the real problem they’re solving for their customers. And that’s kinda what you’re getting at. Or at least have no ability to put it in the words or the voice of the customer. And when you can do that, it really sends sort of a magical message to the person you get me. Exactly. I think that’s why it’s such a great starting point. Let’s talk about expansion, which is again, another one of the accelerators. A lot of people just traditionally, it’s like, Hey, we’ve gotten to a certain point. Do we go after a new market? Do we just make more products? Do we go into a different geography? How do you help people hone in on smart ways to grow, I guess?

Clare Price (18:01): Well, I look at market expansion and I’ll use an overused term and hopefully you’ll forgive me. The land and expand approach to expansion, which is finding your core niche, finding that core area where you’re the strongest, and then moving out from there. I tell my clients it’s a pie, not a circle, because what I typically find is that people wanna get customers everywhere, especially when they’re startups. And so they’re sort of creating dots in a circle that never ever get connected. But if you look at it as a pie where there’s a starting point and from the starting point you sort of expand out from there, you look for related niches. And I do have a chart in my book that talks about when my first consulting after leaving the corporate world was in real estate marketing and branding. And it was great until 2009 came along .

(18:57): And then, oh, I will never forget, I was driving to one of my clients, Ke Williams in living in Sacramento at the time, and I’m driving up to the office and look across the parking lot and financial title company, which was one of the largest title companies in the Sacramento region. Their doors were bolted, were literally chain locked, and all of their file boxes were outside the door permanently closed. The real estate marketing and branding that I was doing disappeared very quickly, as you can well imagine. Yeah, I had to find a new niche. So what I did was I looked at what are the characteristics of what a real estate person is dealing with in terms of branding and then what are similar, what would be similar professions? So for example, real estate they’re all selling the same product, so they have to brand on their person, their own character, their own style of working. So who else has to do that? Well, insurance representatives for example, and financial representatives. So looking for related segments that have the same characteristics that you’re already serving. So the product is likely to be a good fit or a good fit with small modifications, I think is a really good way to go. And it’s particularly valuable for those companies that don’t have a huge marketing budget who need to take it slow so they can take advantage of the next door neighbor, if you will, in terms of the customer segment.

John Jantsch (20:29): Awesome. Well, Claire, we’re, we have run out of time, but I’d sure love it if you’d invite people to where they could find the book, where they can find out more about your work.

Clare Price (20:39): Okay, well I wanna let your audience know, John, that I do have a special offer for them. If they go to octane growth.com/my offer and click the link, they’ll be given free download of the first chapter of the book and they’ll also be able to set up a 30 minute discussion consulting call with me if they wanna purchase the book. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all of your regular channels. There’s also links to those on my website and I just wanna, again, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you and with your audience.

John Jantsch (21:14): Well, thanks so much for stopping by and taking time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Clare Price (21:22): I hope so.

John Jantsch (21:22): 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. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.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 Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner. And Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and like nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:56): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Paul Mannon. He is the head of Global Strategic alliances at Google, where he is developing a growing ecosystem of partners that will unlock the next generation of business value via the cloud and related technologies. But today we’re gonna talk about the fact that he’s a co-author of a book called Decisions Over Decimals, striking the Balance Between Intuition and Information. So Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Magnone (01:27): Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:30): So this book I mentioned you were a co-author. You actually had two other authors as somebody who’s written a book, I can’t imagine the circus that is three three authors, although I know you, you have written another book with Christopher.

Paul Magnone (01:42): That’s right. Yeah. So it’s a very good question and the fact is it’s less of a circus because Chris and I go way back. We went to college together and we did write that first book, but the three of us have been teaching together for seven years at Columbia. So in some ways we’ve written down what we’ve been talking about with each other and with, you know, thousands of, of students in business professionals for some time.

John Jantsch (02:04): And you added a data scientist just

Paul Magnone (02:06): We, we added a preeminent data scientist . So OED Netzer, Yes. A PhD outta Stanford. And he is now the Vice Dean of research at Columbia Business School.

John Jantsch (02:17): So I, I’m guessing the decisions over decimals is a little bit of a play on like paralysis via analysis, like kind of idea, like a little bit of a nod towards close enough is maybe better than not doing anything.

Paul Magnone (02:35): Yeah. At the end of the day, you know, if you think about a decision represents change Yeah. And humans are not wired for change, right? And most of us are risk averse. So what happens is we retreat to one side or the other, some dive into the data, and then once they have the data, they want more data and you know, just keep feeding them spreadsheets and they’re happy. Other people say, I don’t wanna see any of that. I just, I’m gonna make a gut call. Which always sounds good in a movie . And at the end of the day, uh, a an exceptional decision maker balances both. So we tried to capture that in the title.

John Jantsch (03:12): Yeah. So, so quantitative gut calls or as you’re calling it, quantitative intuition,

Paul Magnone (03:18): Right? And that by design seems contradictory. And before I say anything else, I will point out that all three of us authors are technical. We have engineering degrees, we love the math, we adore the math, but it’s like prospecting in the wrong hole if you don’t orient properly first. And that orientation, that deciding what to focus on is a blend of both sides.

John Jantsch (03:48): So is that, you know, it’s kinda like the engineer who can sell, you know, joke. I mean, is that like, is there a person that can do, can do what you’re calling quantitative intuition? I mean, is that, is there a human being wired that way or is it more a matter of like, let’s bring a team of people that have this and they have this and we’ll like fight over where the middle is?

Paul Magnone (04:08): Well, I, so I think large organizations do bring cohorts that are on one side or the other, and that’s sort of natural within org design. But notice what I said at the top. I said, most of us are risk averse and we retreat to our comfort zones. Yeah, Right. That doesn’t mean you don’t have the other gears. Right? So the majority of people, they have intuition and they don’t listen to it if they are really technical because they stay close to the numbers because that’s what they’re comfortable with and they don’t listen to their intuition. Other people say, Well I can’t figure out the math. Yeah. And they say, I’m just gonna make a gut call. And then you show them some of the numbers and they say, Well wait a minute, I really wanna look into that. Oh, so you actually do understand numbers , and so much of this is about giving yourself permission to operate in both modes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because it’s inherent in as we have that ability.

John Jantsch (05:03): So, you know, I will, you know, blatantly say that I err towards the gut call. Intuition aside, probably my favorite part of the book, however, is really your, I think it’s your bridge to getting those together. And it’s this idea of the questions rather than going in with answers or assumptions or even hypothesis. It’s like, are we asking the right questions? And I think that, uh, that element is probably sorely missing in most leadership decisions, isn’t it?

Paul Magnone (05:29): Yeah, very much so. And fact is the smartest person in the room, as we like to say, it’s not the person who blurts out the answer and has the encyclopedic, you know, calculate our memory kind of thing. Yeah. But it’s the person that says, Well wait a minute, have we thought of this? It’s the person that asks the powerful question that cuts through a lot of what the noise is, that you have that aha moment that crystallizes and synthesizes everything.

John Jantsch (05:59): You have a couple, I already mentioned one trademarked kind of term quantitative intuition. You’ve got another one I w I k I wish I knew. You want to kind of unpack your framework for that?

Paul Magnone (06:11): Yeah, absolutely. So at, so many folks talk about getting to an essential question. And you hear people like Elon Musk talk about it. If you go far enough back into the classics, you see it with Plato and Socrates and everything, get to that first principle. That’s wonderful. How do you get to it across a group? And most conversations before you into the first couple of sentences, you’re already anchored on something because the boss already planted the anchor inadvertently . So if you start conversations with, well, yes, we know a variety of things, but we’re trying to interrogate a particular choice that we need to make. What is it that I really wish I knew about that? And you just let that breathe. And the magical word there is wish, because let people use that their wonderful brains and have that open slate and say what it is that they’re really observing as opposed to spitting back what everybody already knows.

(07:16): Cuz that’s what happens so much of the time. You go from there into what we refer to as divergent questions, open it up, collect all of the observations, and then start to aggregate them and say, Well, you know what, now that we’ve had the open conversation that you’ve said what it is that you wish, let’s start to organize that a little bit. And you may want to know, well, is there a market for my product for millennials? That’s a real simple question, but you may find out after going through an exercise like this that I want high net worth individuals, you know, millennials that live in a certain demographic that also like this kind of music that wasn’t in your first question, but when you go through the steps Yeah. Pull that out.

John Jantsch (08:04): Well I think one of the things I, like you already pointed at this idea, a lot of times people are biased by, you know, coming in, people saying, here’s what we’re trying to do, setting the table. But that I wish I knew sort of gives everybody the permission to, I mean, you’re ba first off you’re saying, I don’t know. And so you really then I think give everybody the permission to bring some fresh ideas.

Paul Magnone (08:24): Yeah, exactly. And it’s interesting how it requires people to be brave to say, I don’t know. Yeah. Right? And you shouldn’t have to be brave. It should be known that the world is moving fast, technology information is moving fast, How could you possibly know everything? So having, having an open conversation to say, you know what? We’ve done the work to analyze what we know. Here are a few things we don’t know know, and we think that this is an area to go investigate, as opposed to, let me put a little bow on the answer that you already expected and let’s move on to the next thing. Yeah. Which happens too often.

John Jantsch (09:07): Well, yeah. And you know, just as a leadership trade, it’s pretty empowering, I think, you know, if everybody’s waiting around for you to have the answer as a leader, that could be, that can be hard work. Right. But if you basically are empowering people, go get me the answers. You know, what a great way to lead, Huh?

Paul Magnone (09:23): Oh, you, you know, we hire brilliant people out of tremendous schools. Yeah. And then put them in roles where they’re not allowed to really say what they think. Yeah. So a smart leader maybe sets the parameters, This is what we’re trying to investigate and then doesn’t talk until the end. Yeah. You know, let the conversation flow, let the ideas come forward. Now that doesn’t, that could seem unruly, but it’s not. If you put boundaries around it, you put a framework around it, you time box it and you say, Listen, we need to go investigate. Go be brilliant. Do the things that are your God given abilities that we hired you for.

John Jantsch (10:05): And like all good consultants, you have your A, B, C, D process for ask, brainstorm, capture deliberate, you know, to kind you said put, you know, give it some structure so that’s not just, you know, come to me with any idea you have.

Paul Magnone (10:18): Right.

John Jantsch (10:20): You, this is probably the hardest, I think this would be the hardest part for some people. And that you spend a lot of time talking about this idea of working backwards and it’s, let’s have the end in mind now. Let’s go work backwards and find out what the story really is. Isn’t that, do you find that’s kind of counterintuitive for people?

Paul Magnone (10:40): It, it’s kind of counterintuitive for sure. However, it’s not difficult, right? If you know that, you know, this weekend we’re throwing a party that’s very different than, you know, this weekend we’re getting on a plane trip. And you start to plan accordingly. Similarly, in business, you need to know what that end state is. We didn’t say what kind of dinner party or how many people, but you start to orient your thinking a particular way. So the structure that we talk about with backwards thinking is have that end in mind, build branches to the tree, and then start crossing off the branches that are irrelevant or not going to be fruitful. And you can quickly whittle down to, ah, here is the path forward.

John Jantsch (11:28): And now let’s hear from our sponsor. Creating great customer experiences starts with having a full picture and having the full picture starts with having teams that are connected. Speaking of connected, how are you feeling about that these days? Right. We’re not sitting around the co-working space or the office sharing details, sharing what’s going on, not only in our life, but certainly with our customers lives. But HubSpot helps your team feel so connected, they can finish each other’s sales pitches. Yep. That kind of connected HubSpot CRM platform is carefully crafted from the ground up, designed to unite your data apps and teams in a single easy to use system. So instead of wasting valuable time tracking down information, your teams can spend their time having conversations where it matters most with your customers. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better @ hubspot.com.

(12:26): So, because data is such a big part of this, and I think, I can’t remember the exact quote, but you know, I’ve heard it before, I’m gonna butcher it a little bit, but, you know, essentially you can make data say anything, right? You torture it long enough and you can come up with any answer you want, right? So, so how do you fight the, not necessarily the urge, but even the bias to, to actually just use the numbers to validate, you know, what you’re already thinking as opposed to maybe steering you away from what you’re thinking?

Paul Magnone (12:54): Well, yeah, that’s an important question because with these tools and techniques, like any tool and technique, you could use it to drive in the wrong direction, right?

(13:05): But if you have the right group of people, the right cross section of people, you will ideally not be biased, you will be open up to surprise. We talk about that a bit. And as you discuss what is surprising, what is kind of the illuminating thing that I’ve suddenly discovered? Yeah, if somebody had an agenda, the agenda probably falls by the wayside. If you follow the instincts, right? If you follow the going back and forth between, here’s the data, here’s the judgment, here’s the business acumen, and you’re going back and forth. And I suppose a, a super talented person that controls an organization can still jury rig the decision process , but ideally you’re gonna be further along.

John Jantsch (13:55): So one of the, the, I meant to actually ask this a little earlier, so I’m getting this a little bit of out of order here. But you spend a lot of time on, on the idea that you’re gonna get a better decision almost based on how much time you spend framing the problem. , you know, creating, really creating and thinking through the problem is how you’re gonna ultimately get to a better decision. It’s kind of like sharpening the saw before you go try to cut down the tree.

Paul Magnone (14:19): Yeah. It’s, you know, measure twice, cut once. It was, uh, I think Einstein that said I’d spend 99% of the time thinking and 1% doing. Yeah. And that’s really the case. It’s, I see it all the time. Here’s a spreadsheet that answers the question. Isn’t that the spreadsheet we used last week,

John Jantsch (14:37): ,

Paul Magnone (14:37): But what, like, how is that relevant right now? So taking that step back and saying, well what are we really solving for? And not taking that first answer because the first answer is probably not thoughtful enough. And you know, it’s interesting how the lessons from childhood come ringing through. Keep on asking why until you’re exhausted and there’s no more why’s. Yeah, yeah. Well, why is that? Well dig a little deeper, dig a little deeper. And the mindset that we think the majority of folks should have as they go through this is to be an interrogator. Now you can be an interrogator without being annoying , but it is to be an interrogator. Much like a journalist looks and says, well what is the core here? What, what is it that I’m really seeing? And do I trust this data? Is it reliable? Where did we get it? Who brought it forward? Did that person have an agenda? Now let’s take that, put it in context. Hey, we just sold 12 shovels. Well the guy in the store next to you sold 20 shovels. Oh, well we need to do more next week. Hey, it was a fluke snowstorm in August, right? Understand what’s happening and put it in context and does that change the strategy of your business? And so then, you know, just ask those questions. That pressure, if

John Jantsch (16:08): I adopt this process and I spend a whole lot of time framing the problem and I get the right data and I, you know, I ask the right questions and I get everybody brainstorming and I make a decision and it’s pretty clear that it was the wrong decision at some point down the road. Right? Does this, I’m really teeing this up because this will, you know, this will be a softball for you, but I’m imagining somebody saying the fact that I spent so much time making the decision, does it make it harder to reverse it?

Paul Magnone (16:39): Well, you know, decisions, first off, understanding if a decision is an absolute or it is reversible is an important right point, right? Most often people lock in because they think, Well I’ve gotta make this decision. And once it’s done, I see other organizations where every single decision is reversible. Either way, you’re bogging down progress. Yeah. And so there’s no guarantees here that gonna absolutely get the right answer, but what you’re going to ideally do is move crisply, be more thoughtful and stop wasting company resources as you’re trying to move forward.

John Jantsch (17:28): Now if you were, say you were consulting with somebody and you were advising them on this process, taking this process, would you say that one of the things that this process, one benefit of this process or going through a process like this, would be that it helps eliminate some of the risk?

Paul Magnone (17:45): It should, It should. And we talk about a decision moment model is something else we talk about, which is another little framework where we think you can map every decision along three dimensions, time, risk, and trust. Mm. So do you have no time or do you have a lot of time? No time, it’s maybe it’s a crisis. A lot of time it’s congress or parliament. Low risk or high risk, right? No time, low risk, get the sandwich, get the salad. No, a lot of time high risk, you are gonna be in a committee for months.

(18:25): The third dimension is trust. Do you trust the information? Do you trust the person that gave you the information? Do you trust the organization that stands behind the person? And you then start to think, well, is this reputational risk for me? Or like, what, what is going on here? So as you start to triangulate on time, risk and trust, you can say, is this a critical decision that needs to be made? And how crisply can I move through it? Or is this a decision that we don’t have to apply our top resources to in the moment?

John Jantsch (19:03): Would you say that that this process takes practice and that, you know, rather than once a year when you have that big decision to make, like the annual planning or something or the creating new product, you trot this out? Or is this something that you ought to actually use as a framework, you know, for maybe almost every little decision so that when the big decision comes along,

Paul Magnone (19:24): I think it’s a habit that it is both a habit that you can start to pick up and start to use right away. But yeah, getting an entire organization to start using a decision moment model or an IIC framework takes a little bit of effort to get there and start small. Find that one ally that wants to give it a shot and then find that second ally. The fact is, a lot of this is just very much around mindset. And we talked about surprise before, when you leave a party, what are you talking about? Are you talking about the food? Are you talking about the playlist? Are you talking about what surprised you? Yeah. So you and your, the friends that you went with, you’re talking about, oh, did you notice that? So in our personal lives, were open to talking about surprises, but in our business lives we bury that because while that’s not what the boss wants to hear or we don’t have time for that, meanwhile that might be the real essential thing that unlocks a better decision. So it is about that mindset.

John Jantsch (20:28): I mean, would you go as far as, I think you wrote, I think you wrapped the book up, you know, where you started with this quantitative intuition almost as culture

Paul Magnone (20:38): I, I think so at the end of the day, we’ve been asked why write a book ? And you know, as I said, we’ve been teaching this so we figured, hey, let’s finally write it down. But we do see incredible waste out there in the business world in decision making. And so ideally we’d like to see a tribe of better decision makers. If nothing else, maybe I’ll have a better meeting down the road. I’ll run it to someone else from the tribe, right? Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:01): Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well Paul, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can, I know the book is available wherever you buy books, but where they might connect with you as well.

Paul Magnone (21:13): Sure. You can find me on LinkedIn, Paul Manone, M A G N O N E, I’m out there. You can come and take our class at Columbia and we teach it both in the exec MBA and the exec ed court. And that is entitled Leading In a Data Driven World. Of course, the book is out there on your favorite local independent bookstores, ideally, but you can find it, the major players out there and the, let’s see, what’s today. I believe the audio book is issued tomorrow the 25th.

John Jantsch (21:44): Yeah, so depending upon when you’re listening to this, we’re recording it October 25th. So book will be available by the time you hear this’ll be available everywhere. And then I believe you also have a website, Dod

Paul Magnone (21:54): Yes, do od the book.com. So decision over decimals is the do od the book.com.

John Jantsch (21:59): Awesome. Well, Paul, again, thanks for, uh, stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Magnone (22:07): I appreciate it, John. Thanks for the time.

John Jantsch (22:09): 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. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.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 Content Is Profit hosted by Louis and Fonzi Kame, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Discover the secrets and strategies of how your business can achieve the frictionless sale. They talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and bring special guests to bring you all the information you need in order to turn your content into profit. Recent episode, The power of just one big marketing idea and How to get it really brings home this idea that instead of chasing the idea of the week, really lock in on one big idea to differentiate your business that can make all the difference in the world. Listen to Content Is Profit, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Carmine Gallo. He’s the best selling author of Talk Like Ted and the Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. He’s a Harvard instructor, CEO, communication coach and keynote speaker known for Transforming Leaders. He’s also the author of a new book we’re gonna talk about today, The Bezos Blueprint, Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman. So Carmine, welcome back to the

Carmine Gallo (01:26): Show. Hey, John, Nice to thank you for inviting me. I’ve been a fan of a lot of the recent podcasts, especially I see you had Paul Zack on on one of your podcasts not too long ago to the neuroscientists. So he and I exchange emails and ideas, especially when it comes to storytelling and oxytocin and all that good stuff that he does the

John Jantsch (01:48): Research and we got into some pretty, pretty deep stuff. No, no question.

Carmine Gallo (01:52): So I feel my oxytocin levels rising already those dopamine levels.

John Jantsch (01:58): So, so let’s jump into your new book, and I’m gonna start off by asking maybe what might be a gut reaction by some people, kind of why Bezos, I know you’re gonna tell me why, but there’s also not everybody loves him . So as a human being perhaps, but maybe we’re not gonna talk about him as a human being and more about it as a salesperson. So I’ll let you, I’ll let you start there.

Carmine Gallo (02:20): When, if you ask 10 people for an opinion on whoever it might be, right? Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you know, any of these visionaries and entrepreneurs here in America, if you ask 10 people for their opinion on Jeff Bezos, which I’ve done over the last three years of doing the research for my new book, you get 10 different opinions. Right? Wide variety of opinions. Yeah, yeah. Running the gamut. If you asked 10 people who worked side by side with Jeff Bezos, their opinions are very consistent. They even use remarkably the same words. They all start with the, the most visionary person they’ve ever met. Then they move into demanding a person who demanded excellence of himself and others around him. And the, and John, they always end with the same observation. They say, Carmine, I would never have traded it for the world. That’s what, that’s where I picked up. Yeah. Why, What did you learn from Jeff Bezos that you adopted and carried over into the companies that you started? So really, my book, The Blueprint is not based just on Bezos, but it’s based on interviews and conversations with former Amazonians who have adopted the leadership and communication strategies that Bezos pioneered to build Amazon. And copied, blatantly copied some of those systems and used them to build their own companies. That’s what fascinates me.

John Jantsch (03:54): Yeah. Yeah. And I assume you probably had some similar research, and maybe even you could have answered this question maybe the same way in your previous book about Steve Jobs, didn’t you? I mean, there a lot of people that felt absolutely very demanding. Yeah. Yeah.

Carmine Gallo (04:08): I, If you want to have a conversation on the role of Amazon in e-commerce or retail, there are plenty of books and articles on that subject. If you’d like to have a conversation about billionaires and or income inequality, whatever it might be. There’s plenty of Bo, there are plenty of books and essays on that subject. What I wanted to focus on is, what, one of the things that intrigued me is I was watching an interview with Walter Isaacson, the famous biographer of Steve Jobs Einstein, uh, Ben Franklin and his other books, and he was asked, who of today’s contemporary leaders would he put in the same category? And without missing a beat, he said Jeff Bezos, because Jay Bezos was not only a visionary, but he was also creative and invented so many mechanisms that startups and managers and leaders use today. So plus John, look, we’re storytellers. I’m an author, The story is irresistible. Yeah. A guy with a bold idea and really no contacts and no funding at that time. No name for a company transforms the idea into one of the world’s most admired brands. And we can argue a company that has more impact over our lives than almost any other single company other than the company you work for. So the story itself is irresistible. Can’t, don’t tell me not to pursue that story. That’s a good story.

John Jantsch (05:43): So yeah, I think arguably you could say, you know, you’re talking about more on our individual consumer behavior and lives, but certainly the entire behavior, e-commerce for sure, retail, in general.

Carmine Gallo (05:55): John, if I had nothing to teach you from studying Bezos, his writing, the strategies he put in place to fuel Amazon, I would not have written the book. It took me into so many different places that my other books that just didn’t afford me, and I continued to learn. I’m constantly learning from some of the strategies he put in place, as did many others. That’s what fascinates me.

John Jantsch (06:20): So you start out the book with this, and I’ve heard you say this, the Bezos blueprint, the readers will learn why simple is the new superpower. So you could argue that’s, I mean, you’re really kind of starting with that as the overall premise of the book, aren’t you?

Carmine Gallo (06:35): Yeah, I could have titled the book Simple as the New Superpower, because a lot of it really falls under how do we simplify complex information. So in an age when we are being bombarded by information, all of our customers, our clients, now let’s focus on marketers and the people who are listening to our podcast specifically, How do you rise above the noise? How do you cut through it? Well, the secret to cutting through the noise is not necessarily to add more noise, but to go in the opposite direction and to cut through it. So there’s a number of different ways to stand apart that appear kind of, or sound counterintuitive early, early on, at least to me. And one is to use short words to talk about big ideas or to talk about hard things. Yeah. And that, to me, that is simple as the new superpower.

(07:36): So I have an analysis in the book, and I have a graphic that goes along with it. I reviewed 50,000 words that Bezos wrote in a shareholder letters over time. And a lot of experts and a lot of CEOs and company founders tell me that those shareholder letters were models of simplicity, which kinda led me in that direction. I analyzed all the, all of the letters, put them through software tools. And here’s something remarkable. As Amazon grew bigger and much more complex, you’re talking about adding artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The writing got better over time. And the, And how did it get better? If you look at readability statistics or readability software, it’s measured by grade level. Yeah. So you probably know this, but what grade level should you be writing for to reach a wide and the largest and widest variety of readers and listeners? What grade level do you think that would be?

John Jantsch (08:37): Uh, probably not post-graduate thesis level.

Carmine Gallo (08:41): Absolutely not. Right?

John Jantsch (08:42): Like little lower. I mean, I, I’ve heard sixth, seventh grade.

Carmine Gallo (08:45): Yeah. It’s eighth grade. It’s eighth grade level. So if you write at an eighth grade level, you are still writing for intelligent adults. That’s the whole, whole counterintuitive notion about it. It doesn’t mean that you’re dumbing down the content. It means that you are allow giving people the opportunity to use less mental energy to absorb what you’re writing. Yeah. Right. That means short words to replace long words, uh, ancient words, one syllable words to replace those Latin-based words that fill up legal contracts, , shorter sentences, the active voice. So 90% of the Bezos letters are written in the active voice. Yeah. Subject verb object. After 2007, his letters became easier to read, even though Amazon grew more complex over time. That whole area, to me is so fascinating. And it was intentional, John. That’s what I learned from talking to people who had worked with Bezos. He is, he has that growth mindset, always learning, always developing, always getting better, writing, public speaking, delivering presentations. That’s a skill. And like any skill you can improve on it.

John Jantsch (10:07): Yeah. I guess we didn’t say this at the outset. I think it would be easy for people to think, Oh, you’re gonna teach me how to build an e-commerce business or something. And what this book really focuses on is writing, developing stories, writing storytelling in a way that gets your message across. And so it, it really is a, Would you say that it’s really a writing book?

Carmine Gallo (10:25): Oh, yeah. If you’d like to learn how to be a third party seller on Amazon, it’s not gonna teach you that . No. These are very actionable tips and strategies that anybody can use any level of an organization or just starting out. Remember, Bezos did not have a name for his company, and he didn’t have a company. It was just an idea. Yeah, it that he built in the garage of a rented home in Seattle. So it, it applies to everybody. A 1 million person company, and a one person company.

John Jantsch (10:54): And now a word from our sponsor, marketers are a key part of business. Um, funny I would say that, right? But that’s because we own the conversation with our customers and having tools that help us have meaningful conversations with our customers at scale, all while maintaining a personal touch is our white whale point solutions can be easy to set up, but difficult to manage and maintain, and all of a sudden you find yourself with disconnected teams and data leading to poor customer experience. Yikes. HubSpot is an all in one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use, meaning you never have to worry about it slowing you down. That’s because HubSpot is purpose built for real businesses. Businesses that test and learn, pivot and push and do it all again next quarter with customizable hubs and tools that you can add or subtract as you grow. HubSpot is ready to help you stop chasing the white whale and start connecting with your customers at moments that matter Most. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better @ hubspot.com. So, so you break the book in three parts, and the first one is really about think. You talk about, I’ve heard you talk about this, that the first part’s about discovering why strong writing skills are more essential than ever. So you want to kind of unpack what we’ll meet in part one?

Carmine Gallo (12:23): Yeah. Especially about, well, that the first chapter is called Simple is the New Superpower because we kind of go into those writing skills. But I also did, I wanted to make this approachable. So I did go back to class myself. I interviewed some of the top writing authors. People have written books on grammar and English grammar and how to write well because eh, a lot of writing books are kind of boring. It’s not like those are the first books that we go to all the time. And so I definitely wanted to, just to understand some of the themes that each and every one of us could use, not just in writing, but whenever we are trying to simplify complex information, whether that’s in written word or in the way we articulate and present our ideas and information. And that’s why simple could be the words you choose. That’s one way of making it simple. How about metaphors and analogies? I have an entire TA chapter just on analogy and an entire chapter just on metaphor, because Bezos, Warren Buffett, and many other leaders who are considered excellent communicators in their own way, tend to use metaphors comparing something that’s abstract to something that’s familiar. And there are a lot of famous metaphors that Jeff Bezos introduced at Amazon that continue to be used today, not just at Amazon, but many other companies.

John Jantsch (13:49): It, yeah, I mean, I think one, one of the things metaphors, you know, really can do for is take a complex idea and have people get it right away. And, you know, in a handful of words, I think they also can be mixed. That can be misused, , you know, it’s kinda like a lot of things. You try to use humor in your writing and if it, you know, if it’s not actually funny or if it falls flat than it actually does the opposite for you. I think that’s, that can be, you know, a lot of me, a lot of metaphor use actually falls into cliche, which I think then probably works against you, doesn’t

Carmine Gallo (14:18): It? Oh, thank you, John. I actually talk about that again, if a metaphor is too cliche, it’s a, it’s not going to connect with people in any, any meaningful way. So it’s a little too long to get into. But Bezos chose the analogies and the metaphors he used extremely precisely. He was very deliberate about the metaphors he choose. He chose, So he took the flywheel concept. I’ll just give you one quick example. Yeah, yeah. He took the flywheel concept, which he read from a book. He’s a voracious reader, Read a book by Jim Collins. Yeah. And took this whole idea of the flywheel mechanism and used it as a metaphor for how to grow a company, how to create growth momentum within a company. So it’s a metaphor that has to become an analogy in order to be explained. He has to be able to explain it a little bit.

(15:14): And that’s sort of the difference between a good metaphor and an analogy. An analogy is more of an a tool for education, but that if you look up Amazon flywheel or even the flywheel effect, it’s often tied back to Amazon. And a lot of people use it in different organizations. But if it wasn’t for Jeff Bezos reading a book, adopting something from a different discipline and applying it to his company, it wouldn’t be nearly as popular a buzzword as it is today. Yeah. So reading, thinking, always growing, applying ideas from different fields, different disciplines, different books, that was sort of the secret sauce that helped fuel Amazon’s strategy and align teams from 1994 all the way to today. They still use the very same metaphors and strategies that Bazos put in place decades ago.

John Jantsch (16:10): Yeah. Flat, you’ve flywheel, you know, in every startup, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, entrepreneur is using, you know that as Exactly

Carmine Gallo (16:19): Sean, what was fascinating to me is for years I live in Silicon Valley, so for years I hear things like flywheels. I hear two pizza teams. Yeah. That’s another Bezos metaphor. I hear that constantly in startups. I also hear them talk about six pagers, which are narrative memos that, again, Bezos buy at Amazon. More often than not, when I tell people that, Oh, you know, that’s an Amazon thing, it really got started at Amazon under Jeff Bezos. They look at me like they’ve never heard that idea before. I mean, I got this blank expression on my, on their face. And so that’s why I realized that there were a lot of things that Bezos created, these mechanisms that he created at Amazon people use today, and not even aware that it’s directly tied to his vision.

John Jantsch (17:12): The part two talks about story building and story structure. You can’t really pick up a marketing book today that doesn’t talk about storytelling . It’s really become the, the thing. But I don’t find too many, This is ironic. I don’t find too many of those books that are actually able to tell people how to do it, how to use it. Everybody says you should be using stories. But a lot of people then go, Well, how, So what do you feel like this book will bring to the story structure conversation?

Carmine Gallo (17:40): I hope I can add something to it, because I have a feeling some of my writing was responsible for creating some of this as storytelling is a buzzword. Cuz I wrote a book that talked like Ted, which really went into storytelling. Then I wrote an entire book just on business storytelling called A Storyteller Secret. And I get that book quoted back to me quite a bit. When people talk about storytelling, You’re right, it’s now become a buzzword, but it’s still abstract. Yeah. I don’t think a lot of people understand what it is. So I try to give people some very simple, actionable tools that they could use. The ver the simplest thing, and very few people understand this, maybe your audience does more than other leaders. Yeah. And that’s the three act structure. So I’ve got at least the whole chapter just on the three act structure, which Bezos follows meticulously when he talks about the Amazon story.

(18:37): And the three act structure is the same structure as most Hollywood movies Follow, which is, act one is the setup. Act two is the challenge or confrontation. Act three is the resolution. Very few people break their presentations up into a three act structure, introduce products as a three act structure. Steve Jobs was very intentional about doing so. So I try to break down how to, what we mean by storytelling and how to do it simply. Yeah. I feel like the three act structure is something that many people are not aware of, John, but it’s simple for them to implement and it helps them understand what we mean by storytelling.

John Jantsch (19:18): Yeah. I think a lot of times just giving people an outline, a structure, you know, like that makes it easier for them to go, Oh, okay, now I know where to start.

Carmine Gallo (19:25): Yeah. Don’t just say, do storytelling, you gotta be a storyteller. I hear that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think the average leader understands how to implement that.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah, totally agree. Uh, so part three then is about, okay, I’ve got my story. I know what I’m supposed to say. How do I deliver it in a way that is going to have impact, which is I think essentially what part three is about.

Carmine Gallo (19:44): Yeah. My favorite chapter in part three is make the mission. Your mantra again, I think is a, is an area that very few people understand or they certainly don’t, it’s not an element of their communication that they’re v it’s that’s very obvious to them. We all have a mission. Okay. Almost every company has some kind of mission or purpose. Often as you know, they’re just gobbly cook. It’s a mission statement that’s drafted by committee and put into a drawer somewhere. And that’s why I never was a big fan of mission statements because most of the people I interview or work with can’t even remember their own company’s mission statement. Yep. So I didn’t put a lot of stock into that. Then I started researching Bezos and Amazon. I’m looking at it differently now. Don’t look at it as a mission. Think of it as a mantra in 1998, in a second shareholder letter, or 1999 Yeah.

(20:43): Second shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos began to articulate this idea that Amazon would be the world’s most customer-centric company, the world’s most customer-centric company at the time. John, it may not mean a lot to you today, but at the time it certainly did because most people had the question, what’s the internet? And now you want me to buy something and put my credit card into this thing? They didn’t understand it. So everything had to be customer obsessed. But what Bezos did over 24 shareholder letters and in every interview, every presentation, everything I could get my hands on for 30 years, he always brought it back to the mission. We are earth’s most customer centric company and that’s why when we developed the Kindle, this is what it means to the customer. We are earth’s most customer centric company. And that’s why when we developed our new cloud division, this is what it means to the customer.

(21:46): Yeah. Everything was about bringing it back to the central mission. And today, this was 19 98, 19 99. When you go onto Amazon today, what’s the mission? Earth’s most customer centric company? When I heard Andy Chassy, who was the new CEO of Amazon, when I heard him in his first interview, he used that phrase several times. It’s internalized Bezos isn’t even there, he’s on the board, but he’s now he’s running, you know, Blue Origin a space company, but it’s still internalized within the company and that, that’s what I mean by a mantra. Yeah. Forget about this mission statement, Turn your purpose and mission into a mantra that is simple, easy to understand, and something that the leader repeats. Yeah. If you don’t repeat it, it doesn’t mean

John Jantsch (22:34): Anything. Yeah. I mean, you you, one of the things about the mantra idea is, you know, it inherently brings in simple, but you’re right. A lot of times, even if people are passionate about a mission that they have, if it’s not baked into everything, people just, people forget about it. They don’t, you know, if the leader’s not saying it every day, why do I have to remember it? . So, so I think that’s part of what happens, You know, when I first, I think, Is that your wife or,

Carmine Gallo (22:59): Uh, my wife Vanessa. Yeah. She works with, with you, me and co-teaches at, at Harvard, some other places with me.

John Jantsch (23:05): So, so when she kinda sent me, Hey, you know, Carmine’s got a new book out, here’s what it’s about. And I’m thinking, ah, Amazon, you know, Apple, like what do they have to do with small business? I have a lot of small business owners show whisperers. Oh yeah, absolutely. And but when I dug into it a little bit, particularly, you know, one, one of the concepts, the day one concept, which is another term that I think you’re gonna suggest was Coin by Bezos. You know, that’s something that really, I don’t care what size company you are, that is really a pretty brilliant idea, isn’t it?

Carmine Gallo (23:35): Absolutely. And talk about the mission. So on day one, Day one is not a thing, although if you go to Seattle, it’s a building, it’s called the Day One building on the Amazon campus. day one is not a thing, it’s not a building, it’s a mindset. That’s how it started. Day one is a mindset for always learning, always growing, always approaching every day, no matter how big your company gets or what area goes into. Always thinking about it as this is day one always growing because day two, as Jeff Bezos later said, means stasis complacent complacency, which leads to irrelevance at a slow, deteriorating, painful decline. So again, he’s ta that’s something that’s consistent. It started in 1997 with his first letter and his last letter in 2000 that came out in 2021. He ends it with, and remember it’s always day one. So if you have a vision or you have values that run your one person company or your small business, you’re the one that needs to keep that center stage. You need to shine a spotlight on your vision and your values, both among your partners, your team, and certainly your customers. But it, it has to come from somewhere and, and that’s what leadership is.

John Jantsch (25:02): So, Carmen, I appreciate your stuff about the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast to talk about the Bezos Blueprint. You wanna invite people where they might find, obviously the book will be available everywhere, but where they might connect with you or find out more about your work.

Carmine Gallo (25:14): Yeah. Please visit me online. If you can remember a good Italian name like Carmine Gallo. You could find me online. You can go directly to to my website and that has my books and how you can contact me. And please for any of our listeners jump on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn and I love having interactions and I talk to a lot of people every day on LinkedIn. So I think I’m the only Carmine Gallo in California. Ah. So I think I’m pretty easy to find.

John Jantsch (25:43): Well my, uh, freshman in high school Latin teacher’s name was Father Mario Perelli. So

Carmine Gallo (25:49): Yes, you, you,

John Jantsch (25:50): Speaking of great Italian names.

Carmine Gallo (25:52): I know a lot of Marios

John Jantsch (25:54): . Well, awesome. Well, again, Carmine, it was great, uh, for you to take the time to, to catch up with us and hopefully we can run into you again one of these days right out there on the road.

Carmine Gallo (26:03): Yeah, thank you. Great opportunity. I love your podcast. I love the platform and, and your listeners who I feel connected to. So thank you, John.

John Jantsch (26:12): Thank you sir. 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. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.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 Content Is Profit hosted by Louis and Fonzi Kama, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Discover the secrets and strategies of how your business can achieve the frictionless sale. They talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and bring special guests to bring you all the information you need in order to turn your content into profit. Recent episode, The power of just one big marketing idea and How to get it really brings home this idea that instead of chasing the idea of the week, really lock in on one big idea to differentiate your business that can make all the difference in the world. Listen to Content Is Profit 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 Ben Congleton. He’s the chief executive o Larker and co-founder of O LA Live Chat. For the last 13 years, he’s helped thousands of organizations communicate with visitors on their websites, including many small businesses. So Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Congleton (01:18): John, it’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:21): So we were talking before we got started, the space website chat bots, you know, we’re gonna get into all that, but OAR was really early on, like maybe before anybody,

Ben Congleton (01:32): Right? We were early, we’re back when it was technically hard to do. I think things had gotten a lot easier since then. And you know, there’s a lot of people in the space, but I think, you know, as a company that hasn’t raised a lot of money and is kind of focused on being that growing small business, we’re still here. We’re still at it and there’s a lot of exciting things we’re working on.

John Jantsch (01:51): What did you, I’m curious what you did in your previous life that had you say, I’m gonna start a website chat company.

Ben Congleton (01:58): That’s a good story. It’s, there’s like the long version and short version of that story. So I’ll try to condense it down for you. The quick version of the story is in 2019 99, 19 98, I started a web hosting company. Okay. And back then there was just a couple of live chat providers on the market. In fact, one of them was this Israeli company called Human Click. And Human click ended up getting bought by live person and taking and becoming the technical backend for everything the live person has done. So all their engineering is now based in Israel At that time they discontinued all the good SMB solutions. So it was only like really kind of unstable, janky p p things that weren’t very good. And so I had that experience in the late nineties and then 10 years later I had this consulting firm and still had the web hosting company kind of going and was looking around at projects to do and decided to go after failing at a couple of other ideas and looked at like, Oh, let’s look at chat again.

(02:55): And this was 2009, 2008 and not a, a lot had changed in the last 10 years. It’s still basically the same five players. They’re all focused on enterprise Fortune 500 Comcast. And I wondered like, hey, now that we’ve gained like a little bit of skill, can we go back as if in a time machine and build that tool that we needed 10 years ago? And, and I think we did a pretty great job of that. We built something that was so easy to install that anyone could put it on a website. I think arguably we kind of defined how chat works on the internet today and that’s, that’s a big accomplishment.

John Jantsch (03:27): So go back to I guess that 2008, you know, what was startup life like at that point? I mean, you know, everybody’s envisioning the like teams of engineers sitting around, but I’m getting the sense it was like you and another

Ben Congleton (03:41): Coder. Yeah, I mean I’m, I am, I have a computer science degree. I got a master in computer science, but I’ve always been stronger on the business side. And so in 2008, I mean, it’s funny right, because that was another kind of recession year, right? But as someone who was,

John Jantsch (03:54): Wait, another reception we’re not going,

Ben Congleton (03:57): Well, I guess we have

John Jantsch (03:58): Recession yet,

Ben Congleton (03:59): But not yet. Right? But all right, well we’ll see what happens. But point being is, yeah, it was just me and a couple friends and we had just been in, in college and I was working on a PhD and I had this consulting firm on the side I, this hosting company kind of running. And it was really just, you know, hacking away on Sunday and just working on just writing code, trying to create an MVP before people had terms for things like that. And getting something out the door that we could start playing with and showing the people. And it was basically a completely free product for a year before we had any monetization scheme. Cause I’m pretty bad at, uh, monetization and revenue. Like I would say the things that I care about are product and solving problems. Like that’s what gets me up in the morning.

(04:42): That’s what I’m excited about. That’s, you know, the thing that I get to do basically every day. Cuz you know, you build a company, right? You’ve been at this for a while. Like you talk to people and they’re like, Oh, like why haven’t you sold this thing? Or whatever. I mean, I think about it like I get to work with really smart people working on important problems that I care about doing meaningful work. That’s all I really want to do in this life. And I think that if I can do that and make impact for our customers and you know, innovate and do new things, like I’m pretty happy. And so yeah, we got some excited things that we’re working on now that, you know, keep me up at night and that’s fun. That’s a fun place to, Well

John Jantsch (05:17): Don’t get ahead of me cuz I’m gonna ask you that one. But was there, what was the point where you, and maybe you haven’t got there yet, , what was the point where you said, I think this is gonna work? You know, I, uh, people are paying us. I think we,

Ben Congleton (05:28): Yeah, that’s a really funny story. Maybe we haven’t got there yet. Like I am, I’m like the most optimistic person, but I’m also like deeply fearful, right? Like I, you know, I mean I think that we’re, as a small business, as a provider in this space up against giants with millions and millions of dollars. Like I think that, I don’t know, I don’t think anyone’s safe. I mean look at Slack, right? Slack is a product that was arguably super successful and they still felt they had to go sell it to Salesforce in order to have a long term home. And so I think that like, I, I don’t, the macro level story is like, I don’t think you’re really ever there. At least I don’t feel that way. Some of their companies might, from a like early days standpoint, I mean we were right outta college, We were used to making like $30,000 a year and that was good.

(06:13): Like, that was like, you got the fellowship, right? That was what you’re getting paid as a grad student. And I think this guy’s now make 50 to kind of account for inflation. You know, I, I think when we got to the point where we could hire our first employee was a pretty big milestone cuz OAR was o it was kind of a weird company. Like we, we went through our Combinator in 2009. We raised a total of $85,000. That includes the money at Y Combinator gave us, So Y Combinator gave us 25,000 and then we raised another 60 from just like a friend’s dad, an early Google guy and like a couple of people we met through the YC network. And so we had a little bit of money so we could pay rent and buy food and we just kind of sat there in a house and did that.

(06:54): The old version of the start story where you don’t need a bunch of money and just sat there in a house and built things for our customers and shopped at Costco. Like, that was basically what we did for the first couple years. And when we got to the point where we could hire our first employee, like that was pretty exciting. We would have this graph like that, we’d get emailed out every day, be like, we hit this line, the graph we’re gonna go buy grill so we can sit out back and grill . Like that’s what the kinda revenue charges we’re targeting .

John Jantsch (07:22): That’s awesome. So, so other than the fact that you’ve now got a lot of competitors in the space, how has chat evolved maybe even from a consumer behavior standpoint?

Ben Congleton (07:32): That’s a, it’s a really interesting question to ask. I think arguably I want, I don’t wanna say that the well has been poisoned, but I think that the act in the early days, right? When you got a little chat box in that low right hand corner and what we innovated was really saying where there’s gonna be a person there to talk to you on the other end of it. Yeah. A lot of folks like would just have that and you’d click and be like, Oh no one’s here but we were, ours would always be accurate. And so we really wanted the set the expectation that like as a customer, if someone says they’re there, they’re there and you can go like talk to them and get a question answered and that’s better than the phone. It’s better than waiting on hold. It’s, you know, a direct line to someone who can actually help sell you the good, solve your problem.

(08:10): And I think that what has happened over time is that more and more folks have added little things in that low right hand corner that don’t actually get you to a person. And I think that is damaging holistically to user behavior across like these things. Cuz they’ve become, like many folks have kind of turned them into little qualification bots and there’s nothing wrong with a qualification bot, but there is something wrong from my opinion of a qualification bot that there’s never gonna be a person there because some folks kind of act like there’s a person there. And I know like Drift is pretty well known company with space. I think they basically coined the idea that you could have like a little thing over here that never rowed to a human being. And and it’s so easy, so much easier to sell that because you don’t have to staff it and it’s just like magic. But it actually changes all the customer behavior cuz you aren’t gonna answer 10 questions if you can’t actually talk to a person on the other end of it. So that’s one challenge that the space is facing.

John Jantsch (09:09): It’s interesting, it’s, it’s a tool that was actually created as a service that a lot of people have turned into friction.

Ben Congleton (09:18): Mm-hmm . Yeah. I mean I’m always curious to figure out how to reduce that friction as much as possible and you know, from the business side, right? It kind of makes sense, right? Because the business is oh this is a cost center, this is, you know, talking to my customers, it’s expensive. I think that is one way of looking at the one mindset you could use. The other mindset you could use is every person that I communicate with is a relationship that I’m building. I’m build, I’m recruiting people to my team. I’m trying to like build an ecosystem of folks that believes in me. And I think that the way you approach communicating with your customers and showing that you’re different and showing that you care is the way that all of us differentiate in this incredibly busy world that we live in. I mean, why is anyone in business, they’re in business to serve their customers. And so let’s think about like how I can effectively serve my customer. How can I wow them? How can I show them that I actually care? And you know that real time communication is probably about as good as it gets in the sense that like no one’s gonna call your one 800 number and pick up the phone every time, right? Anymore like it’s

John Jantsch (10:22): Uh, yeah, I mean sometimes it’s a challenge to find the phone number on the website.

Ben Congleton (10:27): Yeah, no I think, I think that most have disappeared and if you’re lucky, at least get a chat that’ll route you to a person occasionally. I mean it’s short term versus long term playing.

John Jantsch (10:36): And now a word from our sponsor, marketers are a key part of business. Um, funny I would say that, right? But that’s because we own the conversation with our customers and having tools that help us have meaningful conversations with our customers at scale, all while maintaining a personal touch is our white whale point solutions can be easy to set up but difficult to manage and maintain and all of a sudden you find yourself with disconnected teams and data leading to poor customer experience. Yikes. HubSpot is an all in one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use, meaning you never have to worry about it slowing you down. That’s because HubSpot is purpose built for real businesses. Businesses that test and learn, pivot and push and do it all again next quarter with customizable hubs and tools that you can add or subtract as you grow. HubSpot is ready to help you stop chasing the white whale and start connecting with your customers at moments that matter most. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better @ hubspot.com.

(11:49): So we’re talking about the evolution, but you know, what’s the emergence of ai? You know, and you know, bot technology which is often driven by aai sometimes. Yeah. Uh, you, what’s that doing to this space?

Ben Congleton (12:02): Well I think it’s interesting. I think I went to this talk I know a couple years ago south by Southwest and had like, you know, the guy who created Siri in a couple other AI folks talking. And I mean, what I like to do is use a thought experiment. Well just imagine that Google has the best stuff, right? Imagine that Google and Apple and these billion dollar account in Microsoft, right? They basically have the best AI tech that you can possibly get and they’re building personal systems with it. Now imagine how well that stuff actually works in practice, right? Yeah. Imagine like the breadth of questions you can ask Siri Now that’s basically stay the art, that’s as good as it’s gonna get. Everyone else is selling a dream of trying to get to that thing using tech from open ai, which is funded by Microsoft, using tech from Google and Amazon and of dialogue flow and all this various like NLP processing.

(12:55): So I would argue the state of the art is still getting there and there’s a lot of people that are selling the dream and you can probably go look at like live person stock price, which is down probably sub 20% is is down 20% from where it was like maybe five years ago or something like that. So, so like they’ve been betting on this. I think that the uh uh, there are some cool stuff happening with ai but arguably most implementations of AI at this point is basically intent detection, which means I can take something you write in text.

John Jantsch (13:28): Yeah. Did you, did you say yes or no? ?

Ben Congleton (13:30): Oh

John Jantsch (13:31): You said yes. Well no, I was gonna say it’s

Ben Congleton (13:33): Yes or no, but it can get more, It can get better than that. It can get better, right? It could be like, what are you asking about? Right? Like if I say like, you know, I’m looking for a new car, it can probably determine, I’m looking for, I’m looking for a car in a more confident way than just looking for the keyword car. So that that works pretty well. And that’s some, you know, AI tech support by Google and Amazon and that that’s more or less state art, what chatbots are using today. And then you can also build trees where you take, you know, a series of questions and you move through ’em. You can think of ’em as kind of like phone trees with a better ui cuz it’s like way easier to like navigate through a series of questions. You can have phone trees where some nodes in those tree are a plain text answer and that can solve and that stuff can solve real business problems. And I think that if you have that kind of interaction then you have context around what’s actually going outside of your company. Like are folks available? Are there experts on this topic? You know, is this person coming in on a high value ad campaign? Maybe I don’t wanna run ’em through this like complicated flow and I wanna just get ’em over to a salesperson in sap. You can build some pretty great stuff.

John Jantsch (14:38): Let’s talk about the emergence of SMS in this equation. Mm-hmm , I’ve noticed a number of the chat related kind of com companies are really focused on driving people to text off the website, you know, off the website chat. But to text, where do you stand on that? I

Ben Congleton (14:54): Think it’s a use case question. I think it’s like what, what are you trying to achieve with that goal? I understand why marketers like it, right? Because marketers want another channel that they get folks to listen to you on and email is saturated, right? Right. SMS is not yet saturated. It’ll get there, you know, we’ll have better spam prevention et cetera. You’re already seeing some of the stuff happening on phones today, right? Of making it harder for unknown numbers to text you and handshake stuff required to use that SMS stuff. So I think that the, the main reason from a business standpoint is businesses like it because now I got a phone number and I have a way of getting your attention, right? That’s the main value for the business, the consumer, but don’t can kinda benefit a little bit.

John Jantsch (15:37): I’m there on the phone anyway, you know, doing it.

Ben Congleton (15:40): Yeah. So the consumer side, it’s a little bit, it’s interesting, right? So if I’m on a mobile device, right, like SMS is gonna probably be a better way for me to communicate with your business than over than over the web

John Jantsch (15:51): Chat form or quite

Ben Congleton (15:52): Honestly, right? Yeah. But if you’re doing b2b, you’re probably not on a phone doing it. Like a consumer I think is primarily like it’s a good consumer bio like Facebook who seems to have lost a lot of our trust, right? Like had their little floating thing, their floating messenger, messenger widget in the corner. It was basically accomplishing that same SMS goal, you know, is mostly adopted inside e-commerce for transactional thing again because marketers really like the ability to target based on the information you get from filling out that. So I think that, I think that that use of SMS and the use of Facebook are largely driven by marketer behavior rather than consumer behavior. But I think that there are some use cases where SMS makes a ton of sense. I think when you’re dealing with online offline transactions, it makes a ton of sense.

(16:42): Like if I’m hiring a, like a service that’s gonna come to my house or a plumber or things like that. I think if I’m buying things on a website and I just want to have some for a one off transactional situation as a consumer, I don’t think SMS makes a ton of sense as a business. Obviously I wanna be able to reengage you via the SMS channel. So it’s, yeah, it’s interesting. I think when O Ark looks at this we, you know, we’re working towards having way better SMS support. I think the use cases that we care mostly about are the longer term relationship use cases for sms. Though I think that there’s plenty of marketing tools for just blasting out an sms. Sure. We wanna be the tool that helps you create those lasting relationships and like a little bit less automated, a little bit more personal, that type

John Jantsch (17:26): Of, so, so where you really staked your claim is the person that’s gonna put this tool on the website with the idea that you’re gonna build relationships and have pretty much real time conversations with a real human being.

Ben Congleton (17:40): That’s what I want to do. I mean that’s what I care about. Yeah, like, I mean I think ultimately like what’s the point of business? I think it’s a series of relationships that you have with others and you want those relationships to be positive. And so that’s the part of the problem that I wanna work on as an individual. And I think that that’s the, that’s the company that, you know, founders a Boots job founder. I’ve gotten the luxury of being able to build up around me.

John Jantsch (18:02): Yeah. Let’s talk about it. Accessibility a little bit. Yeah. What role do does a chat play for somebody that might have site or hearing or you know, other issues that make the traditional web not as navigable? Mm-hmm

Ben Congleton (18:19): , I think that broadly speaking, like chat is one of the most powerful accessibility tools you could possibly have. They’ve done right. I think that part of what’s been going on with OAR recently is that uh, for a long time we had this mission to make business human and I think it took us so a while to figure out what that actually meant, but over the last couple years we’ve incorporated as a public benefit corporation to advance accessible tech. We’ve become more active in that community and learned how much we have to learn. Like there’s a lot to learn around like doing accessibility well and doing it right. It’s far more than a checkbox in an audit, which I think that many folks kind of approach that as. Sure. And so when I look at, you know, chat on a website, I think about like this is a communication channel, right?

(19:04): This is a channel that I think arguably anyone should be able to use to communicate with anyone. And so you’re trying to figure out, you know, if you’re vision paired, like how do you communicate using this channel? If you’re using a screen reader, how do you communicate using this channel if you are, you know, mobility impaired, like how do you simplify that UI and that navigation inside of it? And I think that list goes on and on. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot there that you can do that we can control inside that little box no right hand corner. Yeah, we can’t control everything else that’s on your website, right? But I think we can control that channel and we can also allow you to hire folks on the other end that uh, can staff it that have lower vision. And I think that’s kind of the journey I’ve been on recently where I realized how few of these tools that may meet accessibility standards, like there’s a bunch of standards out there, the most well known is W C A G and you can go look that up, but a lot of standards around that.

(19:59): But to actually make the operator experience accessible well, so you can actually hire folks who are visibility impaired or you know, it’s kind of inside that space to me. Like that’s when you start creating some real wins and that’s sort of like the direction I’m trying to take this company.

John Jantsch (20:16): So you alluded to stuff you’re working on, maybe you just talked about it there, but what’s coming for oar if you’re out there looking at, Well,

Ben Congleton (20:23): There’s a couple things that I think are new and exciting for oar. Like one is we’re kind of on this journey right now to be a leader in accessible communication. I can’t say we’re anywhere near that today, but that’s kind of where I want to take the company. I think that we’re going to see over the next couple years a lot of regulation around accessibility. We’re seeing digital ADA already enforced. We’re seeing some legislation being passed in Europe and uh, I think there’s a real opportunity to not just check the boxes, but really show how far you can go there. So that’s one kind of 10 of where we’re headed. The other place that we’re headed in this is that, you know, we talked a lot about automation on this call and about, you know, say the art of ai. We’re interested in kind of doing more that we’ve done a lot of ai, we have a tier, it’s called our pro tier for O A C.

(21:08): And so we’ve worked with folks basically building, doing, I wouldn’t call ’em like custom bots, but a lot of tailor, like a lot of tailoring of that AI tech and machine learning tech to help people solve problems and make it simple for that user, be able to work with non-tech customers and really help them realize their vision. And I think that’s something we’ve been doing some of and we’re gonna be doing a lot more of. I love the concept of like if I, if someone can sketch something on a piece of paper like a workflow or a process, it should be that simple. That’s how easy it should be for someone non-technical to have their vision realized via automation. And then the third thing I think that’s going on is adding more channels. I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about sms. SMS is really on our list for the first additional little channel that we’re adding.

(21:49): We’ve been rebuilding our operator experience to make it not like a tacked on thing, but like a core piece of how alert communicates with folks. And as part of that operator work, we’ve also been investing heavily in accessibility to make it accessible. But once we get those initial pieces in place, you basically have, uh, I would call it like a, like an AI enabled user interface that is incredibly accessible that works multichannel. And that’s kind of, I think it’s kind of like where things need to go with the key piece being like there’s a human in the loop. We’re not just trying to build some system that you like, stick there and put in the corner. It just like magically builds relationships. Your

John Jantsch (22:25): Customers, you never have to, to talk to anyone again,

Ben Congleton (22:27): this plenty of people selling that, John, there are plenty of people selling that dream. And to me that is, I don’t have the metaphor on the tip of my tongue for it, but I think it’s, it is not the road that you want to be on as a small business entrepreneur. If you want to go build Comcast from five years ago, 10 years ago and create that kind of customer service for your customers and you happen to have a monopoly, like I think you’ll be doing great at driving your costs down. But I think ultimately your customers and your relationships with your customers are the largest asset of your business. And your job as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a small business owner is to leverage that asset to generate as much value as possible. And that comes through deep relationships.

John Jantsch (23:09): Awesome. Well Ben, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Do you wanna tell people or invite people where they can connect with you?

Ben Congleton (23:16): Yeah, you can. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can just add me on LinkedIn, say you saw me here cuz I got tons of requests. But if it’s coming in from John, like on or from John’s audience, I, I know you guys, I wanna talk to you so you can message me there. You can follow me on Twitter at Jam and Ben, um, or just, you know, drop by oar.com and talk to someone there and just ask for me like we’re staffed. We got people there. You know, I can pretty easy get in touch with for if you wanna chat more. Awesome.

John Jantsch (23:41): Well I appreciate you taking that time of your day to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Ben Congleton (23:48): Absolutely, John, it’s been a pleasure.

John Jantsch (23:50): 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 Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.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 Content Is Profit hosted by Louis and Fonzi Kame, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Discover the secrets and strategies of how your business can achieve the frictionless sale. They talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and bring special guests to bring you all the information you need in order to turn your content into profit. Recent episode, The power of just one big marketing idea and How to get it really brings home this idea that instead of chasing the idea of the week, really lock in on one big idea to differentiate your business that can make all the difference in the world. Listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:54): Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Joe Polish. He’s the founder of the Genius Network, one of the highest level groups in the world for entrepreneurs. Joe has helped build thousands of businesses and generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients. He’s also the author of a book that we’re gonna talk about today, what’s In It for Them, Nine Genius Networking Principles to Get what you want by helping others get what they want. So Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Polish (01:25): Thank you John. Super great to be here with you. So

John Jantsch (01:28): I, is it possible this is the first time you’ve been on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast?

Joe Polish (01:32): It is. Which is hard to imagine, you know, cause you’ve been on my podcast but I’ve never been on yours so this is, well this is really good.

John Jantsch (01:38): We’re making up for it then. So do you have like the three minute version of your life story? , not everybody probably listening to this knows who Joe Polish is, although, you know, you are one of those people that has like people we’re gonna talk about in your network. Everybody knows who they are. , you’re kind of one of those people that has, has quietly done some amazing things I think, and maybe just not a household name because of it. But I think your story is amazing.

Joe Polish (02:05): No, thank you. Yeah, and by the way, I try not to be famous cuz oftentimes I work with a lot of people in the world of addiction recovery cuz I’ve been in recovery myself. Yeah. So I focus on entrepreneurs and people that struggle with addiction and oftentimes they’re the same people. And so my life’s story, the real quick version is boy crazy, bit of a childhood. Uh, mother died when I was four. A lot of abuse growing up, a lot of disconnection, a lot of moving around. Very introverted, very shy, very disconnected. And so it’s weird that today what I have built is like one of the best connection networks on the planet and really try to connect people. And a lot of that came out of just pursuing entrepreneurship and just trying to do something in the world and make a living and survive.

(02:47): The other part of it is it feels really good to be around people that you feel connected with cuz people are either communicating, they’re connecting or they’re trying to escape. Those are like the three types of ways that I would frame it. And I write about that in, in what’s in it for them. Trying to describe what is connection, what is disconnection, how do you connect? And so I was a Deborah Carpet cleaner was my first endeavor into running a business. I lived off credit cards. I went pretty deeply in debt, you know, back in 19, late 1989 to about 1992 when I first discovered marketing. Then I turned this small carpet cleaning around and then I just fell in love with marketing and with words and how to use education based marketing. And even back then, what’s in it for them was, you know, one of the best ways to sell something to people and you’re a master at this, is you educate them on how to make a buying decision so that your advertising isn’t about price, Your advertising is about education and leading people to make buying decisions.

(03:44): And then I started teaching other carpet and upholstery cleaners in the nineties. I built the largest training organization in the world for that industry. Over 12,000 cleaning restoration companies worldwide became members. I licensed it to all kinds of other service businesses. And along the way I started doing group, you know, programs and that became Genius Network, which it is today and now it’s as high level entrepreneurs. It’s a connection network. And I bring people together to focus on health, mental and physical health wealth. Not just making money but not losing it, which are two different skill sets in what I call elf, which is easy, lucrative, and fun. So you can have an elf business which is easy, lucrative, and fun or easy, liberating and fun if it’s in the personal relationship or health, Uh, or elf half versus elf, which half is hard, annoying layman frustrating. Or it could oftentimes be hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating. But not all money’s created equals. So my whole thing, it used to be elf marketing, now it’s people projects. And I think that was longer than three minutes, but close , there we go. Yeah, that’s sort of what I do today. I look for how to have aligned elf relationships with people.

John Jantsch (04:52): So, so on the surface, maybe somebody read this and think, oh this is a networking book, which I guess on the surface it kind of is, but it’s not your typical networking book. You’re not gonna read things in this book that you’ve probably read in other books about you know, how to go to networking events or how to build relationships. What made you wanna write this book? Now we’ll get into like the details of what I just said, but what made you wanna re write this book now?

Joe Polish (05:17): Yeah, well you know, oftentimes I’ll hear authors say you and I just really wanted to share my message with the world and I feel so blessed in all that sort of stuff. And to a certain degree, I mean I think a decent human hopefully comes from that place. I mean, most people write books and stuff cuz they wanna make money, they wanna build their businesses, they wanna do stuff like that, right? This is my fifth book. This is the first book though that I have done as a mainstream published book by Hay House. And so there’s gonna be a lot of effort put behind it. Almost all of the proceeds, probably all of ’em. I say almost all because we haven’t, you know, we’ll see how this plays out. We’ll go to Genius Recovery, which is my Addiction Recovery Foundation. So I didn’t do this book quote unquote for money.

(05:53): I mean I have very high price programs. I give very well. Most of my clients are very successful. All that. The reason I wrote it is in a lot of ways for myself, my own purpose is I wanna sift, sort and screen narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths from entering my groups and entering my world. And the book is a roadmap of who I like doing relationships with my value system, my moral system, my ethical system. But hopefully I want to empower the givers of the world to be better givers, better boundary givers. And I want people to be quit coming at the relationships from being a taker because everybody wants something. I mean, you know, everyone listening to this listens to you cuz they want something and they want more business, they want a better business. You know, they, for me, people often want an elf business.

(06:41): They want to make money, they want to sell their stuff. But ultimately we all want something like later today I’m gonna want lunch and so I want to go eat lunch. Uh, when it comes to relationships with people though, you wanna show up with a give that’s either greater or equal to your want. Because if we think, you know, in our own lives, who is it that annoys us? It’s people that ask for things, but all they have is an ask. They want something from you, but they don’t show up with something. So all they care about is themselves. And so I wrote the book for the younger version of myself. You often hear people on podcasts, What advice would you give to your 18 year old self or your 16 year old self or your 20 year old self or your 30, you know, whatever.

(07:20): And I’ll be 55 next year, you know, in February. And it, I, this book is the combination of how do I meet people, how do I connect with people? What are some of the methodologies and the strategies and the capabilities. So it’s a capability book. Uh, however, it’s really a character book disguised as a capability book cuz it’s not just about having capabilities to connect and how to connect, but it’s also, uh, to be a decent human and to protect yourself from the takers of the world because life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. And I’ve had so much horrible situations with people that I have helped in my life. And there’s that famous Zig Ziglar line, which I really like in the right context, which is you can have, get anything you want in life or have anything you want in life.

(08:09): If you help enough other people get what they want possibly because you can spend your life helping a lot of other people get what they want, that not only won’t do a damn thing for you, but they will abuse you. They will mislead you, they will betray you, they will take from you. And I love how to win friends and influence people. Amazing book. Even in the beginning of my book, I, you know, say if you ever read that book and this book wouldn’t even exist, I say, this book I’m pointing to, this is what it looks like. It’s got this crazy little yellow cover. It says what’s in it for them. That’s the question to ask yourself. That’s the, that’s the point behind it is you know, how to win friends and influence people is great, but not if they’re not great people. So my whole thing is how do you win the right friends and influence the right people?

(08:53): How do you develop relationships with people that are aligned with you? Because I don’t want to work on relationships like our friend Dan Sullivan says, I don’t wanna work on a relationship, I just want a relationship that works. And not that networking requires doing no effort. You know, networking though, handing out business cards, making contacts is a total waste of time. If you are coming at it from, let me have an agenda, let me pursue, you know, let me be an opportunist. So there’s nothing wrong. As a matter of fact, both me and you have spent so much of our time helping people identify and access and reach and make real the opportunities that they have in their life. But there’s a big difference between pursuing an opportunity, developing an opportunity versus being an opportunist. So the point of the book is to protect givers from scoundrels and to be a better giver and to hopefully create a culture where there’s, people are more thoughtful of why they’re going into relationships.

(09:51): Because it’s not only, you know, more fun that way, but you just don’t leave scorched earth and people that are these, you know, there’s connecting where you really connect with someone. And then there’s connecting where people connect by conning people, . And I don’t, I want to get rid of the Conn stuff cuz it’s so much of our marketing world, as you know, is filled with people that just, they’re not ethical. They from my value system, you know, again, I’m only speaking from what I consider, what is a good way to, you know, walk the earth

John Jantsch (10:22): And now a word from our sponsor. Marketers are a key part of business. Uh, funny I would say that, right? . But that’s because we own the conversation with our customers and having tools that help us have meaningful conversations with our customers at scale, all while maintaining a personal touch is our white whale point solutions can be easy to set up, but difficult to manage and maintain. And all of a sudden you find yourself with disconnected teams and data leading to poor customer experience. Yikes. HubSpot is an all in one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use, meaning you never have to worry about it slowing you down. That’s because HubSpot is purpose built for real businesses. Businesses that test and learn, pivot and push and do it all again next quarter with custom customizable hubs and tools that you can add or subtract as you grow. HubSpot is ready to help you stop chasing the white whale and start connecting with your customers at moments that matter most. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better@ hubspot.com. You talk about your struggles with addiction. I’ve, I’ve heard you talking about it openly. It’s in the book as well. And I found it interesting that step one, I think it was in the book, how, how they’re suffering, find out how people are suffering and how can I help? I mean, it it is, does that come from you’re suffering?

Joe Polish (11:53): Absolutely. You know, my mother died when I was four. My father lost the love of his life. He was broken hearted. He never recovered. He was tormented. He, you know, would move every year or two. We would, you know, just start to develop friendships cuz you know, depending on if someone’s extroverted, introverted, shy, not shy, et cetera. It was really hard for me to develop relationships then. I had a lot of physical and sexual abuse as a kid. And that really messes with you. I mean, you know, a lot of trauma. And so addiction is a response to, to trauma. And so with, you know, with that level of, of disconnection, I had a lot of pain. But I found that if I smiled, which in the beginning as a kid, it was a way to protect myself from my father. You know, getting very angry.

(12:39): And so it started as a survival mechanism. Now in the business world, enthusiasm covers many deficiencies. you know, there’s, if you’re just simply, if you have enthusiasm though coupled with value, with the ability to be really helpful, then you can connect to people. And so one of the things that I suggest to people in the book, and I try to go very deeply, I’ll try to, I actually do what one of the feedbacks I get from a lot of people is like, Wow, this is not what I thought this book would be about. I, you know, yeah, I talk about pay and to be a pain detective. Cause I, I believe what humans want John is they want more woo in less. Ah, that’s what we want. You know, like more woo, you know, like this is gonna make me feel good, this relate, you know, more money, more business, more access, a better body, better health, but more fun.

(13:24): And there are certain things that are ah, but they produce woo like exercise or I do cold plunges and saunas almost daily. Believe me, stepping into a 32 to 38 degrees cold plunge is ah, in the beginning. But the dope mean that you get the feeling that you get how you build up a, you know, just a physical tolerance that then leaves you feeling better, produces more woo. So there, in order to have a really good network, you know, everyone’s probably heard that saying, you know, your network is your net worth. You’re going to have to work. Just spoken in an event a couple days ago at a friend of ours and I said, Yeah, I had on the screen, you know, it was about 450 people in the audience. And I had a slide that said, gyms don’t work. And I said, People often come to me and they’ll say, you know, 12 step groups don’t work.

(14:15): Which are often said by people that have never gone to a 12 step group or have only sat in it. If someone said, you know, to you like, you know, John, I read your book, I’ve been to your, you know, I’ve went to your strategies, I’ve been to your events, It doesn’t work. It’s like, that’s like saying gym’s don’t work you, you can’t join it. Jim, sit on the bench and then say, you know, I’m not lifting the weights, I’m not riding the bike. Gyms don’t work. You would never say gyms don’t work. But people say that about personal development, learning, marketing strategies, learning every sort of education. Well you’re gonna have to work it. You have to put in your, what I call Tammy, your time, attention, money, effort, and energy, which are the things that you can spend. But where I try to suggest is come at it from pain.

(14:59): Find the pain in someone’s life. Because what entrepreneurs do is they solve problems for a profit. You know, look where you can find pain, look where you can find suffering in there. If you can reduce the suffering or in many cases eliminate it or at least give them ways to do it, Not only is that a quicker way to build rapport with people, it’s a more authentic way to build rapport. I love people that come into my life and not only help me remove angst and pain and annoyances, but they actually come and approach me from a very thoughtful way. So if there’s any agenda, because I suggest don’t go, don’t interact with people with an agenda. What I really mean is make sure your agenda is not a taker agenda. If your agenda is to be a giver, that’s a much different agenda. If your agenda, because pain is where, you know, I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have recovered from addiction.

(15:52): And when I say recovered, I could easily fall back in the, in into addicted behavior. If I have enough stress, enough angst, enough overwhelm, consuming my life because addiction is a solution to pain. The opposite of addiction is connection. So when I’m disconnected for myself, I’m disconnected for others. And I will look for oftentimes negative ways to scratch the itch. And so we’re in the middle, like right now, I think the timing for what I wrote this book for, I took a one year sabbatical last year and the one thing that was helped me, you know, I didn’t publish the book, they wanted me to publish a book. I’m like, I’m not going to do it. But what I did in a one year sabbaticals, really look at the world, really look at what happened with the pandemic, the global trauma that has been created of what, through, what everyone’s went through.

(16:38): And I’m like, okay, you know, what do I know? What have I learned that I could write about that would be the most useful for people? Not only to connect with others, but to connect with themselves first and to, you know, if I could just help people by 5%, be more focused on what’s in it for them, what pain do they have in their life and how could I be useful to them first before I want them to be useful for me? I think it, it just takes away so much of the crap that people try to do in order to get what they want in life. I mean, get what you want in life by helping the right people get what they want, the useful people get what they want, help the givers become better at getting what they want. And if you approach people in that way, really focusing on pain reduction and reducing suffering, man, they will appreciate you. Just like the economic definition of appreciation or depreciation is you go up in value. And so that, that was one of the things that I hope do with the book.

John Jantsch (17:35): I think it’s a good practical way for people to think about something that I think we all get , but it’s a good practical way to think about it. Another thing you, for those of you on watching the video portion of this, Joe’s wearing a jeans network t-shirt. So that has been a great, that as you, as you mentioned in the intro, has been a big part of your life’s work for the last decade or so. You have an exercise in the book and I think I’ve been through this exercise with you so I know you’ve been teaching it for a while, but to telling people to create their own genius network. And I think it’s, the nice thing about it is it’s so doable, so practical, it creates priority and focus. Rather than saying I just need to have this big network. So maybe explain that concept in the exercise that you teach in the book.

Joe Polish (18:18): Yeah, absolutely. It’s called My Genius Network. And I believe any problem in the world could be solved at the right genius network. And what that means is a genius network versus a network is a genius network is a group of people and individuals that have capabilities and skills and resources that if you can access them and you can combine them with yours, it will actually produce results. Cuz there’s a lot of talk about thought leaders in the world, but any idiot can come up with a thought. As a matter of fact, a lot of thought leaders steal other people’s thoughts, present them as their own and then they’re called thought leaders. But I actually like result leaders like John, you’re a result leader. You do work that actually produces results for people. So it’s like, okay, so who do you know in your life that has skills or capabilities?

(19:02): What is their name? And then the exercises, I have people write circles like eight circles and they put a line through it, a uh, you know, a horizontal line and they put the name of the person on the top and they put the skiller capability in the bottom. And I say, think of people that are dominoes, like in in the book, what’s in it for them? I and every chapter with the dominoes, which are what are the ideas or the things that could make a big difference? So who’s been a domino in your life and what is the skiller capability? Then once you’ve identified their names, you list who they are, what skill or capability do they have? How can I help them? That’s the next question. After you’ve identified who they are and what their genius is, what that genius skill or capability is. And it doesn’t need to be like Einstein genius, it could just be an expertise or a capability that’s useful. They’ve

John Jantsch (19:49): Done something you want done, right, ,

Joe Polish (19:51): Yeah, if you want, if you wanna do a genius network on I wanna get in better shape, you want, you may want a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a yoga therapist, you know, a massage therapist, you know, I mean like people that can help you if you wanna write a book, do you want an editor? You want a ghost writer If you want, you know, web design. I mean what are the skills and capabilities? You can niche it or you can just take who are the most eight most important people that I wanna be a hero to and who, who have been a hero to me? And then you ask how can I help them? And then when you direct your brain to that and you all of a sudden you’re like, you know what, I really admire these people. I respect these people, I appreciate ’em, they’re part of my genius network. And you approach your interactions with them, then they will naturally wanna help you. And that’s the

John Jantsch (20:32): Goal. And there can be stretch names on there, right? I don’t have to know that person or have access to that person yet today. Right?

Joe Polish (20:39): Well and that’s one of the best ways to, to future focus your future relationship is who is this person and then how can I be useful to them? I’d say in order to develop a genius network, you have to be a genius networker, which is approaching people with the question what’s in it for them? And you have to do genius networking. It’s actually a behavior, but it’s not just, it’s be, do have. In order to have a genius network, you have to be a genius worker and do genius networking. And if you actually approach it that way, and this is not complicated, I did not write this in a way that, you know, no one could do it. You have to be some superstar, you have to be some extrovert. As a matter of fact, I’m an introvert that forced myself to go and meet people because the one commonality is everything that is good in my life comes through relationships with other people.

(21:29): Even the things I do like meditation and that I do in quiet that was taught to be by someone, that I was helped by someone. No one, you know, silent battles are the hardest battles to fight. You’re as sick as your secrets when I, you know, all the stuff that I do in addiction recovery would not happen had I not had other people that cared about me and in many cases cared about me more than I cared about myself at a certain point in time. So I wanna be a domino for people. I want to help people with all. Cuz the number one question I get, how do you meet all these famous people? And people think it’s knowing famous people. It’s not. I mean, you know, John, you’ve met a lot of famous people, you’ve met a lot of rich people. Some of them are jerks, some of them are miserable.

(22:09): You know, I mean you don’t want to just meet well known people. Some of the greatest heroes in the world are, you know, people working at hospice centers, you know, single moms raising kids. I mean, there’s amazing people in the world that are not celebrities. I don’t want Genius Network to be known for me. I want it to be known for the people in the group. It’s a connection network. And so, you know, I’m just wanting to convey those things that I’ve learned so that other people can build it. Cuz a more connected world is a happier world, A more connected person is a happier person and I would argue to say way more likely to make a lot more money and do a lot better when you’re coming at it from that way. And there’s a lot of people that make money in the world that go to bed every night with guilt and shame and remorse because their methods of getting to the money, getting to the opportunities are not coming from a place of giving.

(22:56): They’re coming from a place of taking. And so I, I want to give, you know, even in one of the things I have in the book is like how to use marketing to find true love and actually show an, an example of a singles a on how to actually write a letter about yourself so that you can identify the right aligned partner. And I have people that are already in relationships and married that use the process and it improves the relationship that they have with their existing partner. And I learned it from a brilliant love coach and we have an interview with her as part of the bonus of the stuff that I talk about in the book. So I really try to cover not just business, but yeah as a human. It’s really about being a better human.

John Jantsch (23:35): So you mentioned bonuses and resources you wanna tell people where they can find the website for the book. Obviously the book will be available anywhere depending upon when you’re listening to this November of 2022. But people where they can find out more about the book and uh, connect with you and, and however you’d like to invite

Joe Polish (23:51): Them. Thank you. The website for the book is literally the name, What’s in it for them.com. We have shorter versions of it, but I finally secured, I had to pay a lot of money. It’s so funny for the website what’s in it for them.com, but now we have that set up. And one thing too, I wanna point out, there’s some really amazing people, uh, Steven Pressfield, Chris Voss, the top former FBI hostage negotiator read the whole book. He’s one of my genius network members. BJ Fogg, the Stanford professor, one of his students used his model to create Instagram. His book, you know, was voted the best Business book of the year by Amazon in 2020. Robert Chaldini the Best Influence Guy. Mm-hmm , I’ve got some of the top negotiations, research behavioral professors, and the top influence guy in the world that have read the entire book and endorsed it. Uh, you know, gr great blurbs from people. But the, the reason I bring that up is every single person that has a blurb in this book and on the website, they’ve read the whole book. I’m not using any testimonials from people. So it’s what’s in it for them.com is where to pre-order the book or if you’re hearing this after November of 2022, what’s in it for them, you know, dot com. It’ll be sold at every bookstore too. So if people pre-order it right now, if they hear it, that would be, I would appreciate it.

John Jantsch (25:00): Awesome. Well Joe, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we’ll see you again one of these days soon out there on the road.

Joe Polish (25:08): Thank you John. Thanks for all the work you do too. You’re awesome. I

John Jantsch (25:11): Appreciate it. 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. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode or the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Content Is Profit hosted by Luis and Fonzi Caho, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Discover the secrets and strategies of how your business can achieve the frictionless sale. They talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and bring special guests to bring you all the information you need in order to turn your content into profit. Recent episode, The power of just one big marketing idea and How to get it really brings home this idea that instead of chasing the idea of the week, really lock in on one big idea to differentiate your business that can make all the difference in the world. Listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Baer. He is a customer experience and digital marketing pioneer, expert, advisor, researcher and analyst. He’s written sixth bestselling books. Couple you’ve probably heard me talk about here on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. He’s also got a great popular twice monthly newsletter. Go get it. It’s called The Bear Facts, and you can find it@thebearfax.com. We’re gonna talk about a research report that he just participated in compiling on consumer patients and business responsive. I have no patience, so I can’t imagine what this is gonna be about. But it’s called Time to Win 2022 Consumer Price Patient Studies. So Jay, welcome back to the

Jay Baer (01:43): Show. Thanks so much, John. Great to be here as always.

John Jantsch (01:46): So you’ve really, you know, it used to just be enough to be a mark, an author, speaker, and consultant. You’re like a pioneer and expert research or an analyst. I mean, I’m,

Jay Baer (01:55): My mom’s an English teacher, so I just said, gimme a list of adjectives or Simi, and I work with that.

John Jantsch (02:01): All right, so, So time to win research study, Just what was the methodology? What were you trying to compile?

Jay Baer (02:06): Yeah, so I’ve been really interested in speed for a long time, as I know you have as well. In all of my books, there is at least one section about speed and how speed is a competitive differentiator in business. This is the deepest dive I’ve ever done though. I said, I’m gonna do a whole research study on speed, responsiveness, and consumer patients. The thesis here was the pandemic has changed our relationship with time. That when you take a bunch of things that used to be offline and you move ’em online, naturally online, you think things should happen faster. And five minutes of waiting online feels like an eternity offline. You can probably get around it. And so the thesis was that we think differently about time now because of the pandemic and the research bore that out. I partnered with Stats Social, talked to 2000 American customers, ages 18 to 65, normalized to the census. It’s good research. You know, it’s plus or minus, it’s two and half percent. You know, this isn’t a 200 person, you know, research, this is a real deal.

John Jantsch (03:00): So, you know, I’m, we all have anecdotal stories, right? If we called three contractors and the only the one that called us back , or the one that called us back first, it’s the ask price. It’s like, you know, if you show up, you got the job. But is, I mean, so essentially, I’m guessing the major hypothesis here is that, that the faster you can respond, the more you’re gonna get.

Jay Baer (03:20): Yes. And that is true. 53% of consumers have hired a company that responded first, even if they were not the least expensive. So, so that anecdote rings mathematically true in this research. So clearly there is a business imperative to be first in a competitive scenario, but there’s also a bunch of other economic consequences of being faster and slower than customers expect or anticipate. So we documented all of those in the research. So there’s big attitudinal shifts amongst consumers. There’s big, you know, likelihood of spending money or not spending money in loyalty as well. So all the things that businesses care about, making sales, making repeat sales, average order size, consumer psychology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Each and every one of those is impacted by a business being faster or slower than customers anticipate.

John Jantsch (04:11): So, you know, I call businesses today and I find myself, Oh gosh, they didn’t answer the phone. God love ’em. But you know who nobody can get help anymore. I’ll give ’em a pass. I think you’re suggesting that I’m an outlier.

Jay Baer (04:23): Mathematically, you are an outlier, and this is one of the most interesting statistics in this time to win research study. The time to win.com is that 83% of consumers expect businesses to be as fast or faster than they were before the pandemic. So this notion that, oh, labor shortages, supply chain force, pelan, fire, you know, flood tsunami, it’s okay, we understand they don’t care anymore. Like it’s been a couple years and I think consumers are like, you know what, like you’ve had two years to sort it out and we feel it for you, but I still want it right now. Sorry.

John Jantsch (05:01): So I spend a lot of time, you know, really talking about this idea with lead generation. So, you know, somebody goes out there and they click on something or they click on that little chat bubble. Yep. And they want to, you know, they wanna get ahold of somebody very quickly. But you specifically are focusing as much on customer experience maybe after somebody’s a customer as well. I mean, how do you see the differences in those two elements?

Jay Baer (05:23): Yeah, we actually broke it down by customer journey scenario. Yeah. So in the research we say, Okay, how much is speed and responsiveness important to you? When you’re finding out about a product, you’re sort of in the research phase. How much is it important to you when you’re getting an appointment? How much is it important when you’re paying for something? How much is it important when you need help, have a question, et cetera. And so across, I think we looked at six or seven different nodes in the customer journey. It’s crazy. Speed is important in all of them, right? There is no scenario under which speed is not important. And in fact, two thirds or more of customers say that speed and responsiveness is important or very important in every single step of the customer journey. Two thirds of customers. Now, there are scenarios when it’s even more important.

(06:11): So if you need help, like something is broken and you’re like, I need you business company person, you know, contractor to fix this leak of in my plumbing, then it’s even more, you know, important. Then it’s upwards of 83%. But it is actually really interesting, John, I thought that we would see a greater difference that people would say, Look, when I’m just in research, I’m just like, Right ITing the tires. Like what sweater do I wanna buy? It’s not that important for it to be fast. Nope. Super important then too. It’s important all the way across the line. And I think part of that is just the world we live in now, and the fact that our expectations around speed and responsiveness have just changed a lot. I mean, five years ago what was, you know, fast then is slow today.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. And I really get that about in the presale environment because I mean, we may not go to ourselves and say, I’m gonna try out this company and see how fast. Right. But we are trying them out. Right? Absolutely. I mean that’s, it’s like if that’s the experience when I haven’t bought anything, you know, that’s what I can expect it to be after I do. Right. Or worse , maybe after I do for a lot of small business owners. I mean, Well, let me ask a set up question to this first. Is there a number, I know it depends, but like, is 15 minutes , like the new threshold, you better respond within that amount of time? Yeah,

Jay Baer (07:25): It’s a great question. It actually depends, as you might suspect on channel, because consumers have a different expectation for response time based on what they’re using to interact with you. So, so we actually asked about website chat versus phone versus text message versus social media, et cetera. And generally speaking, people expect a reply within four hours for everything except for email contact us form, and an online review. Everything else is within four hours, so in some cases faster. But if you can say, Hey, we’ll get back to you within four hours across the board, unless it’s sort of a contact us form. And even then it was kind of surprising we asked about this, you know, the contact us form is usually like the redheaded stepchild of contact mechanisms, right? Like every business has one, but people figure, well, if they’re using that, they can’t be that important, right? Uh, turns out 67% of customers expect businesses to reply to a contact us forum within 24 hours. And that doesn’t happen very often.

John Jantsch (08:30): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have clients that 50% of their leads come in through that vehicle

Jay Baer (08:35): Still. Yeah. But, and they probably, you know, respond, responding two or three days and it’s like, what if you could shave that down for like six hours?

John Jantsch (08:43): No, Jay, they’re clients of mine. I mean, we have an automatic response that goes out immediately. It sends them to tax.

Jay Baer (08:48): Oh, clients of yours. Yeah. You gotta figure

John Jantsch (08:50): It out. It does. There seem to be a correlation between the gravity of the purchase. So in other words, if I’m buying a a $29 thing, maybe there’s one need for speed as opposed to this is going to be a long term significant, you know, months over months investment.

Jay Baer (09:04): Great question on the purchase, on the research and purchase side. No, actually, because whatever you need at that time, whether it’s socks or a car, you

John Jantsch (09:11): Need that. That’s important.

Jay Baer (09:12): Yeah. You need that thing right now. That’s why you’re doing this at all. Now, there’s definitely a little difference in, in urgency if your car is broken versus your sock has a hole in it that, you know, there’s a, there’s an implication difference there. But ultimately, if you are in the mode to go get a thing or you need help, you want that help. Now, nobody ever says, You know what? I’ve been thinking it’d be fine if you guys did that more slowly. Nobody ever says that.

John Jantsch (09:38): Right? Except to the brain surgeon

Jay Baer (09:43): , right? Yes. And it’s funny you say that. I’m actually, I’m writing a speech about this research, about the research. It’s one of the things I talk about. It’s like the lesson in this research is not that speed is inherently better. It mostly is, but there are circumstances when you can be too fast. Right? Nobody wants the fastest tattoo artist in town, you know, and we’ve all experienced, you go to like a Mexican food restaurant in particular, and you order enchiladas and the enchiladas come back in like 90 seconds. Or like, how is there like an inch aada machine? Like there’s no way this can be a good enchilada. So there’s a point at which

John Jantsch (10:16): I always actually assume some, I always just assumed somebody else sent those back.

Jay Baer (10:20): Right, exactly. I didn’t want these. Give ’em to John. Yeah. So you can be too fast. But I don’t wanna belabor that point because for most businesses and most scenarios, Yeah. You know, we’ve all heard that the old saw good, fast, cheap. Pick any two, right? When I will tell you, having done this research is fast, should be one of ’em. And then you decide whether you want to be fast and good or fast and cheap, but it should always be fast.

John Jantsch (10:41): And now a word from our sponsor, marketers are a key part of business. Uh, funny, I would say that, right? But that’s because we own the conversation with our customers and having tools that help us have meaningful conversations with our customers at scale, all while maintaining a personal touch is our white whale point solutions can be easy to set up, but difficult to manage and maintain, and all of a sudden you find yourself with disconnected teams and data leading to poor customer experience. Yikes.

(11:14): HubSpot is an all in one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use, meaning you never have to worry about it slowing you down. That’s because HubSpot is purpose built for real businesses. Businesses that test and learn, pivot and push and do it all again next quarter with customizable hubs and tools that you can add or subtract as you grow. HubSpot is ready to help you stop chasing the white whale and start connecting with your customers at moments that matter most. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better @ hubspot.com.

(11:54): All right. So I know that you did some ranking by demographics mm-hmm. . And the most concerning finding it was that baby boomers are the least patient generation.

Jay Baer (12:04): Isn’t that fascinating? There’s a few things in here that, that definitely differed from my preexisting expectations when I started this process. And one of those is just that John, that baby boomers are the least patient and Gen Z, the youngest Americans, or the youngest adult Americans, I should say, are the most patient. I didn’t see that coming, but then I thought about all the baby boomers I know, and I’m like, Yeah, actually that does kind of add up. And I think it’s sort of, for the younger folks, I think they haven’t necessarily been disappointed enough, or maybe their time isn’t as valuable because maybe they’re not in their professional life yet, they don’t have kids. Or maybe they’re just so used to being disappointed by business, um, that they are like, Yeah, I didn’t expect much anyway. But the baby boomers are the least patient. They expect a response time within four hours, more so than any other generation. I

John Jantsch (12:52): Think we don’t have as many weeks left.

Jay Baer (12:54): That’s it. Maybe that’s it. It’s like, I don’t got a lot of time. I gotta get this yard mode now

John Jantsch (12:59): . Exactly. Exactly. All right. So the small typical small business owner out there saying, Yeah, I get that, that, you know, but I’m now responding to Facebook messenger, to Instagram dms to Google wants to own my chat. Now I got that dang chat bubble on my website because somebody told me I should, I got voicemail, I got email, I got forms. I mean, how do I respond? I mean, who’s got time for all of that ?

Jay Baer (13:23): Yeah, I think you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta make the time.

John Jantsch (13:26): Yeah.

Jay Baer (13:26): It, it’s not about whether or not you have the time. You do have the time. You’re just using that time to do something else. And I think what this research indicates pretty cleanly is that it is an investment and it’s an investment worth making because there are material economic correlations between responsiveness and spending, between responsiveness and customer loyalty. There are things that you’re doing today and your small business that take up your time. And I would ask you to spend some time with this research and then consider are those things that you are doing instead of being faster when you respond to customers worth doing, are they making you money or saving you money at the same level that just being faster would, And I would argue that in many cases the answer is no.

John Jantsch (14:10): A hundred percent , no question. Like 80% of what we do, right? Yep. Is less important than focusing on this. Is there a correlation? I think there is, because you talked about as important speed being as important as price. Mm-hmm. . So could you also make the leap and say you could charge more if you responded faster? Oh,

Jay Baer (14:27): Absolutely. Dramatically. So two thirds of the customers say that speed is as important as price. That’s a pretty giant number. Two thirds. Yeah. Say speed is as important as price. And so we ask people like, would you spend more money if things were faster? And absolutely they would. And it’s pretty staggering. Now, this is not doable operationally for everybody, but we ask people like, Okay, what if you didn’t have to wait? Right? So what if you had this magic scenario where, you know, everything was instantaneous and people would spend dramatically more o on that, in some cases, as much as a hundred percent more. They absolutely love this idea. It is, as I talked about in the research, it’s the idea of like the bus, the Disney fast pass, right? That’s one of the greatest inventions ever. Like, you already paid Disney, but what if you don’t have to wait in line?

(15:22): How much more would you pay the answer a bunch? And so I actually think it, it’s a, it’s an interesting thought exercise for almost all businesses to say, Well, could we offer a parallel service where we do the same thing we’re already doing, but we just do it faster? You, you sort of jump the line, right? I mean, if you’re an attorney, yeah, if you’re an accountant, if you’re certainly an auto mechanic, if there’s a lot of businesses that could actually unfer all that kind of concierge class service. And this research shows that you would have very little price resistance.

John Jantsch (15:57): It’s interesting. I mean, you think back to the days of like printing and whatnot, you know, it’s like you wanted in two days, it cost this price you wanted in a week, You know, it caused this price. Do you run the risk of that being off putting? Like why don’t you just deliver it that fast anyway to everyone?

Jay Baer (16:11): Yeah. You know, it’s a real, that’s a really interesting question. I think there was a time when you would’ve run that risk. Yeah. But I think there’s enough businesses and enough categories of business that have now tried and succeeded in some kind of first class get faster framework. Like, like, you know, even Uber does it now, right? They, they have this new thing where, yeah, you can get your car in six minutes or for an extra 20% we’re bringing the car in three minutes, right? And so th this idea is becoming popular enough that we start to see it more and more, and then the more and more we see it, I think we get to the point where we don’t feel bad if it’s presented to us as an option.

John Jantsch (16:53): Yeah. The unfortunately, the jokes on us on Uber, because it’s the same car. Oh,

Jay Baer (16:57): For sure. Yeah. All it is purely, it is an absolute just pure naked profit play, but good on . Smart.

John Jantsch (17:05): All right, so, uh, let’s talk about another factor. Trust. Does speed fall into the building trust category?

Jay Baer (17:12): Huge. It, it does up to a point, right? So if you can be as fast or faster than customers expect at whatever stage of the customer journey we’re talking about, it builds trust because the implication is, wow, they really have their act together. They were able to call me back, email me back, you know, get me a car, whatever the circumstances are as good or better than I thought. That builds trust. However, going back to our previous example, when you are too fast, when you are instant enchiladas, when you are any tattoo in 20 minutes, when you are, you know, hey, I do LASIK in three minutes on your eyes, it, it actually reduces trust. So there is in literally every business, there is a point when you can get too fast. Like even in a professional services capacity, like if you’re looking for an accountant and like, like to have an appointment to come in and talk to you about your services, I’m like, great, what are you doing in the next hour? You’re like, Wait a second, this firm is not very busy. And yes, that’s really fast, but how can they be that fast? Right? It starts to, you start to really question the whole enchilada, so to speak. So yeah, you want to be, I call this John the right now, The right now is when you are slightly faster than customers think you should be. And then it’s like the magic, you know, warm portage, right? You’re like, Oh, perfect. But when, when you’re too slow, obviously it’s a problem. And when you’re too fast also a problem.

John Jantsch (18:41): Yeah. So, so the lesson to the accountant is that even if you have nothing going on, tell ’em it’ll be a week after next Tuesday.

Jay Baer (18:49): Ab I mean, literally, yes, that is the lesson. That is absolutely the lesson. But I will say, you gotta figure out what that is, right? So this is kind of what the speech is gonna be about when I get it finished. This idea of the right now is you have to figure out what that is in your business and for your clients. There is no blank. I can’t say, I can’t say, you know what you should do? If someone calls for an appointment, you should give them an appointment in 48 hours. I can’t tell you that. What I can tell you is give you a recipe and a methodology for figuring out what the right now is in your business.

John Jantsch (19:19): So I was gonna go to automating speed as really the next, and that really is a, this is a part of it, right? Yeah. Because I think that sometimes if people sit, think you’re sitting there waiting for that message, you know, and it’s like, okay, now I’m gonna reply, right? That, that nobody believes that’s actually going on. That’s, And so if our automations don’t factor the right now, that that can be equally as damaging, right?

Jay Baer (19:42): We have to understand that there is a difference between response and resolution. Ideally response and resolution are one, but we understand in the real world, that’s not always the case. And so a quick response and a slow or non-existent resolution is better than a slow response and a non-existent resolution. But at the end of the day, your problem is still not solved, right? So it really does take two to tango there. And that’s why businesses, when they think through the customer journey, they have to say, Okay, how fast can we reply? But then how fast can we get them what they need? And in some cases there are, those are parallel tracks, not one track.

John Jantsch (20:20): And that might look like the text, a message that comes in on a weekend that just sets the expectations.

Jay Baer (20:24): We got your message. Got it. We

John Jantsch (20:26): Got, we got it. And it’s gonna be Monday. That’s it.

Jay Baer (20:28): , Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Well expect, I mean this whole research, if you look at it, is really driven by expectations we have. We ask lots of questions in there about what do you expect or anticipate? How fast do you expect or anticipate? So one of the reasons why I think customers are kind of up to here with the excuses based on labor and supply chain is that most businesses are terrible about messaging it. They don’t set expectations. Well, , there’s like, we don’t have enough workers. It’s gonna take a while to get a burrito. You know? And it’s like, yeah, you can say that in a way that makes more sense to the customer. Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:00): There are definitely are a lot of hastily written notes on walls

Jay Baer (21:03): And restaurant. It’s always napkin,

John Jantsch (21:04): Please stop abusing our employees. It’s

Jay Baer (21:07): Just not very well done. I mean, make it, you know, shoot a video from the owner that heartfelt explains with some level of detail what’s going on. And then have a QR code that goes to that video like do it, you know, message it better. There’s a restaurant here in town who doesn’t have Turkey. They can never, they never have Turkey. Now it’s like some sort of mythical Turkey shortage. You’ll give you a chicken for free, you can’t possibly get Turkey. And every time I ask, Where’s the Turkey? We don’t know. We can’t get Turkey anymore. And I’m like, what are we living on Mars? We don’t have Turkey anymore. What’s going on?

John Jantsch (21:34): talking with my friend Jay Bear and it’s the time to win.com. You can actually dig into the survey, right? Jay?

Jay Baer (21:43): You bet. There’s the survey. You’ve got infographics, videos, a lot of key facts and figures that you can pull out to help implement this in your own business. And I hope that you do because being faster will make you more money. I can promise you that. Well,

John Jantsch (21:55): Well, I am doing a webinar tomorrow on this around this topic. I’m gonna steal some of your staff. Please do to Jay. All right, I shall. I will give you credit in four point type in the corner. Thank

Jay Baer (22:04): You. As it industry standard, thank you.

John Jantsch (22:06): As is industry standard. Jay, it was awesome as always for you to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully I’ll run into you. Are you gonna be at Marketing Pros?

Jay Baer (22:15): Uh, I’m not gonna be there this time. I was there last time, so I try and alternate to your, but I’ll see you down the road somewhere.

John Jantsch (22:20): Yep. Yeah, absolutely man. Next time I’m in Indiana or so, Appreciate

Jay Baer (22:24): It.

John Jantsch (22:24): All right, take care, bud. It. 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. 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 the MarTech Podcast, hosted by Benjamin Shapiro, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Ben’s episodes are so awesome. They’re under 30 minutes. They share stories with world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. Ben is a great host. I’ve been on his show, he’s been on my show. He always really digs down and gives you actionable stuff that you can take away and do, and he is always bringing up new stuff. The science of advertising, how to figure out what to automate, just things that that marketers are wrestling with today. Check it out. It’s the MarTech Podcast. Find it wherever you listen to your podcast.

(00:50): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Brett Martin. He’s a co-founder of Kumospace, the virtual HQ for remote teams and Char, and he’s also head of Charge Ventures AE VC based in Brooklyn, New York, and serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School where he teaches data analytics. So Brett, welcome to this show

Brett Martin (01:18): And pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:20): I remember the first time I went to New York and I saw Columbia Business School and it said CBS somewhere, and I thought it was a, I thought it was like a record company or something.

Brett Martin (01:28): To this day, I tell people I work at CBS and people think I’m more famous than I am

John Jantsch (01:34): . So I, Let’s just start with the obvious, What is Kumo Space? I’d love to hear how you describe it to people, because you have to do a little explaining. You have, it’s different, It’s something that they’ve not seen before. So how do you describe kumo space?

Brett Martin (01:47): It’s true. Kumo is something you have to really experience or see to believe. It’s really a, you know, it’s a virtual office, what we call virtual office, where remote teams show up to work every day. So in the same way that, you know, we have physical offices that people would commute to, to, you know, they would work, they would socialize, they might get lunch there, they might play ping pong and hang out with each other, but it was kind of a hub for work. We basically, the provide the same thing for remote teams. So it’s a virtual place, some might say in the metaverse, you know, kind of like a video game world where people can show up and do their work. So teams are, um, collaborating in Kuba space, working on whiteboards together, working in documents and spreadsheets, and also playing little mini games like chess or, or ping pong, just like in a real office

John Jantsch (02:36): . Which would you say that this is decidedly a child of the pandemic or you know, was this coming anyway?

Brett Martin (02:45): Well, I think sort of remote, the trend toward remote work was already a secular trend before the pandemic, Right. That had been growing for years. There was already this concept called the, you know, the digital nomad movement where people realize that, you know, if you worked just on the internet, you could really do that from anywhere. Yeah,

John Jantsch (03:03): Yeah. Hashtag Van Life. Right,

Brett Martin (03:04): Exactly. And so what I think happened was the, when the pandemic hit, you know, we took all the tools that weren’t really built for remote work. I mean, we had Zoom and that was the Yeah. You know, have conference calls with people across the world, maybe they worked at your same office and we had Slack, and we used Slack for people that worked in the same building as us. And then we, you know, used them for this new concept of remote work working from home. It was surprisingly effective. Right. But I think now after a couple years, the cracks are starting to show. Right. You’ve heard about the great resignation and you hear about how everyone’s kind of lonely and losing bonds, and there’s nothing keeping people at work other than getting it, you know, now it’s all about just moving from job to job and getting a higher salary because there’s really nothing that ties us to our work anymore.

John Jantsch (03:50): Yeah. You mentioned the Z word in your mind, does this replace, completely replace or is it a supplement?

Brett Martin (04:00): Well, you know, I probably wouldn’t be an entrepreneur if I didn’t think I was going to take over and eat Zoom’s lunch. But, you know, the truth of the matter is that we have teams that both use Kumo space and Zoom in particular. You know, we are focused on internal meetings. People now, plenty of people use Kua space externally. We have guests all the time, but really we’re focused more on how Slack has, you know, created a place to chat with your coworkers. We’re trying to recreate the in-person experience, but bring it online.

John Jantsch (04:32): Yeah. And I think one of the challenges sometimes is out of necessity, people have tied together, hacked together, or whatever we wanna call it a zoom and a note taker on Zoom and Slack, and you know, obviously Slack channels have, you know, exploded. I guess how do you talk about the benefits for that, uh, distributed team or if that work from home, uh, team, I mean, what’s the benefit of adding this? Because in some cases, maybe you’re just saying you gotta add another tool to the mix, or, you know, so, so I’m sure some people are kind of hesitating, like, Oh God, another tool, but, you know, so, so what’s the clear and present benefit of adding to those groups of workers?

Brett Martin (05:10): I think that’s a great question and definitely something, you know, people that are paying for these tools that procuring these tools and administrating these tools they care about, they want, they wanna see the value. So the way we think about it is you always wanna have the right medium for the right message. And we have, you know, certain mediums we have for text based communication. We have Slack for audio based communication. We have the phone for video based communication, maybe we use Zoom, but what’s missing, you know, what we have for in person, you know, physical communication is the office. Yeah. Right. And why do we, you know, even though we have Slack and Zoom and the phone, we still, there’s a lot of people out there still feel like we need to bring people back into the physical office. Yeah. And so, you know, why, why is that?

(06:00): Well, you know, reasons that are often cited are, you know, it’s a better way to collaborate. You get to build better connections with your coworkers. You can build company culture and in a sense of camaraderie, you can iterate, you know, more quickly, you can get visibility to your boss and to your, you know, your me your mentors as a boss. Yeah. You can have visibility and accountability to your employees. Right. You know, you know what they’re doing. You see that they’re in the office. And so we think that all of those things are still valuable, but we’re just building a digital alternative to very expensive, very constricting physical real estate.

John Jantsch (06:41): All right, so, so I’m gonna make you be like a baseball announcer, you know, who has to describe what’s going on the field to an audience who can’t see it? You know, kind of describe the typical, like how we’ve talked about it and I’ve experienced it so I, you know, I know what you’re talking about, but maybe describe, like, people come in, they go in a front door, it’s like a video game. They go over to the conference room, maybe explain kind of how kumo space, how somebody who’s a Kumo space member operates.

Brett Martin (07:05): A hundred percent. I mean, if you want, I’m happy to, you know, pop open Kumo space and take it on tour. I can try the screen share if we want it. Otherwise let’s just,

John Jantsch (07:14): Yeah, let’s see. Let’s see how it populates in the video. You

Brett Martin (07:17): Wanna give it a spin? All right, let’s give it,

John Jantsch (07:18): Yeah, yeah, let’s go for it. It’ll be a, it’ll be a test.

Brett Martin (07:21): Well, let’s give it a spin. I’m gonna pop on this. I’m gonna turn off my, Here we go. I’m gonna join the space. Here we go. Okay, let’s do it. Let’s get the screen share. I’ll go to go to window. Here we go. All right, so you can see this is it. This is basically entering the floor. So this is Kumo Space hq I’m about to walk you into and

John Jantsch (07:48): Yeah, there it goes. Okay. Okay. It wasn’t popping up immediately. Now we got it

Brett Martin (07:51): Now. Yeah, no, no problem. So I’m about, we’re about to go into Kumo Space headquarters. So, you know, we have a fully remote and distributed team. We work in Kumo space all day, every day. And we’re just gonna pop in. I might have to cut my mic so that we don’t get reverb, but let’s give it a spin. So here we are, We just entered Kumo space and you can kind of see me there. I, there I am on my headphones and I’m gonna zoom out a little bit and show you some key features. So this is our virtual office. If you look down to the bottom left, you can actually see that there’s 26 people in here right now. There’s Hector Hager, he just entered. I don’t wanna scare scare him right now, but if you can, we can pan up. And there’s a bunch of stuff going on in our office, just like you’d expect from a real life physical office.

(08:43): So you can see that kind of David and Yang and Bobby are having a little meeting here in the common area. You can see that over here. This is the design and product pod. There’s a bunch, bunch of people, Winnie and Allen and Anthony are and Tony are all meeting and having what looks like a presentation up here in the top left corner of the screen, you can see that Michael and Jordan here all zoom in. Michael, Michael Zoo, who’s our new intern. And Jordan one of our new engineers, they’re having a little conversation in Michael’s office. And then there’s people like Ryan that are just kind of posted up in their office, probably cranking away at work. So I’ll give you a little bit of a tour. I’ll cruise around and then you can see what’s happening.

John Jantsch (09:26): Yeah, you kind of tidied up. You must have known we were coming.

Brett Martin (09:29): Ah, you know, this is just life. So here, why don’t, I’m just gonna cruise in and I’m just gonna pop in. You’re probably gonna see everyone talk to, Let’s see, right here,

John Jantsch (09:43): .

Brett Martin (09:44): So, hey guys, I’m on a podcast right now and I’m actually giving a live tour of our office right now, so you can’t see him, but I got John on the other, the line. Just tell John A. Little bit about what you’re all up to right now.

Speaker 3 (09:59): .

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah, I’m afraid Brett, we’re not picking up their audio, but it really works with a spacial audio. Like you, you come in close to somebody and all of a sudden they can hear you, you can hear them.

Brett Martin (10:11): Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. Hey guys, I, thanks for letting me interrupt. Thanks for that quick explanation and we’ll roll out. Sorry about that, John wasn’t

John Jantsch (10:21): Sure

Brett Martin (10:22): To come through or

John Jantsch (10:23): Nots. Yeah, no, I think this is, and obviously this gives people a visual to go by and see how moving around and can talk to team members and you know, again, for that person that, you know, you think about the distributed team. If you don’t mind, I’ll, I’ll jump to kind of my line of questioning to keep us on time. And now a word from our sponsor. Marketers are a key part of business. Um, funny I would say that, right? But that’s because we own the conversation with our customers and having tools that help us have meaningful conversations with our customers at scale, all while maintaining a personal touch is our white whale point solutions can be easy to set up, but difficult to manage and maintain, and all of a sudden you find yourself with disconnected teams and data leading to poor customer experience.

(11:10): Yikes.

(11:11): HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that is impossible to outgrow and ridiculously easy to use, meaning you never have to worry about it slowing you down. That’s because HubSpot is purpose built for real businesses. Businesses that test and learn, pivot and push and do it all again next quarter with customizable hubs and tools that you can add or subtract as you grow. HubSpot is ready to help you stop chasing the white whale and start connecting with your customers at moments that matter most. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better @ hubspot.com. D

(11:52): o you find in this setting, is it, do you get, does it improve communication or are you feeling like it’s just like for somebody it just makes it easier for somebody to come bug me? Kinda like in the office, you know, it’s like I’m sitting over at work and people are like, Hey, to see the game last night, You know, is it improving it or is that just me? I’m an extrovert or I’m an introvert. So that’s just me

Brett Martin (12:15): Introvert with how many hundreds of podcasts are belt

John Jantsch (12:19): ? That’s right.

Brett Martin (12:20): Look, I think that we are not, we’re trying to give you the benefits of the physical office, but also leverage the power of the internet, right? Yeah. So, you know, one of the cool things about the internet is that it’s infinitely replicable space. I can build an office for a hundred, you know, 10,000 employees. I can build you, you know, hundreds of different floors, you know, a hundred different floors for your 10,000 employees all across the world. You can have really rich analytics about what type of person, you know, responds well to different types of things. I, you know, I think that historically the office has been a one size fits all solution, right? Yeah. You have a physical office and no matter who you are and how you like to work, whether you’re an engineer and you need your quiet time or you’re a salesperson and you like the heat of the boiler room, right?

(13:15): You know, the physical office wasn’t very flexible. It’s expensive and to move around, Adam to move around physical matter, but the benefits of the virtual office and what we’ve learned about remote work is that actually remote work is different for every person, right? So if you do sales or if you do engineering, but rather also it’s like what type of apartment do you have? Do you have plenty of space to work in? Or are you wedged in with your girlfriend and you’re both trying to do 10 hours of conference calls the course of day, or maybe you are a parent, right? And maybe you need the office to, you know, get some space and have some place to get away from your kids so that you can actually do some work, right? And so what we’ve realized is that actually in remote work, it’s all about personalization and every, you know, capturing exactly what that person needs to do their best job. And so we think that kumo space is the right tool because we actually can customize our virtual spaces to work for all different types of people in different types of work.

John Jantsch (14:14): Are you seeing, are there any surprising uses? I’m sure you kind of said, here’s how people are gonna use it. We’ll build it like that. Are you seeing some people like go, oh, here’s how we can use it?

Brett Martin (14:24): Oh, I mean, we learn from our users every day. And to be honest, when we started we knew that there was a problem with, um, online, you know, getting, we knew there was a problem with group video chat. Essentially we knew that this zoom, you know, format of one person broadcasting and everyone listening and turning off their screens and turning off their audio, you know, it really didn’t lend itself to the real time video. Right? It’s fine. I mean, I could watch most Zoom conference calls. I could probably watch a recording of and be just as good. And so we knew that there need, there was probably a more participatory way of building video chat, but we didn’t know what people were gonna use it for. So it turns out that people have had weddings in Kumo space. People have had funerals and kumo space, people have had graduations, People do corporate recruiting in Kumo space. People have had large conferences and happy hours and game nights and all sorts of things. And we just realized that as our own team, what we really missed was a place to show, you know, as a remote team, we, what we were really lacking is like a place to show up and connect with our coworkers on a daily basis. And so that’s where we just decided to focus our

John Jantsch (15:34): Work. What are some of the other toys you’ve built in, I know when you gave me a demo, there’s a whiteboard functionality. I think you have some team building like games that can connect. What are some of the kind of toys that maybe might help not only communication but maybe culture?

Brett Martin (15:49): Well, that’s one of the kind of crazy parts about kumo space is that our average virtual office user uses kumo space for more than five hours a day. So people are living in this office in the same way that they do in a real physical office. And so when you have that much of people’s time and attention, you know, really the possibilities are infinite. So yes, you know, we obviously have productivity tools, we have whiteboards, we have sort of integrations where you can, you know, stream Google documents and spreadsheets and you can integrate with your, you know, productivity tools of choice. Like if you’re using Figma, which is a design tool, or you’re using Jira, which is, you know, task man, task management, we have all of that. Um, but what we think makes Kumo space really interesting is le you know, playing with the schism of a, you know, a virtual office and integrating in a way that sort of, you can’t really get out of Zoom and Slack.

(16:48): So in Slack you can tie it to your, um, you know, POS system, your Shopify, and you know, you can get a little notification at any time, you know, a customer signs a contract, right? But in Kumo space you can tie, you know, your CRM to the Gong app that we have, and it rings a gong in the office and it plays the name of the salesperson that sold that. And if you think about, you know, we’re really not making up anything here. This is already happening in physical offices. You already have sure, you know, sales people running in the gong and you already have dashboards talking about kind of core KPIs for the company. But we’re just bringing that into, in a virtual space and doing it in a kind of a fun human way that you’re not getting from, you know, your Slack or your Zoom.

John Jantsch (17:35): One of the things I’m guessing was a decision, and maybe it was a, maybe it was a visual decision or a design decision as opposed to a technology decision decidedly as those anybody who was online looking at the, what we showed there, decidedly Lofi graphics, kind of super Mario , you know, game mechanics. Is that a technology choice or is that a design choice?

Brett Martin (17:57): So, I mean, we actually think that rich graphics are a fun place. I mean there, believe it or not, there’s actually a lot with lower fi. There are, you know, some other people in the market that have even lower five or actually don’t even believe in the concept of having a virtual office that you can decorate. One thing I would say differentiates us is that we’re actually called, often referred to as a kind of the most professional virtual office. And in that part that’s because we are, you are your avatar. So in Kumo space, you know, you are video, you are, yeah, your avatar. Some other places use, you know, kind of cartoons or cartoon faces. Yeah. Or video game characters. And we don’t do that because, you know, we want you to be the player. You are the player in Kumo space and we, you know, we want it to be professional. So we think it’s a balancing act between professionalism and, you know, keeping making it fun and making it engaging.

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. Yeah. So let me give you the one push I can push back. I can almost probably hear from people who are invited by their company into we’re gonna hang out now in this space. Oh yeah. So now you can watch everything I do all day. , do you get that pushback a little bit from the people that are work from home that are like, Oh, now you’re gonna like, see when did I check in? What am I doing?

Brett Martin (19:17): So look, there’s two sides to every coin, right?

John Jantsch (19:22): Definitely two sides to that one. Yeah. There’s

Brett Martin (19:24): Two sides to every coin. And so I think, yes, this concept of FaceTime is right, you know, never been a positive word, right? And so FaceTime, whether it’s in the physical office or virtual office, implies kind of wasted time that you’re doing so that your boss thinks you’re busy. And we don’t believe in that in a virtual space anymore than we in the physical space. That’s said, there is a flip side to this, which is, hey, if you’re a junior employee and you’re trying to learn the ropes, or let’s say you’re younger employee and you think, you know, your work is actually, and you move, you know, your work is a core part of your social community, then getting face time from your boss or your mentors and having opportunities to connect with your colleagues to build a professional network are all major advantage. You know, are all ma very important career steps for your career that just literally don’t exist historically if you use a tool like Slack or Zoom. So if you think about that, you know, remote workers were always treated as second class citizens, right? It was always ancillary functions or back office functions is what you had remote people doing. Yeah. And there were never really opportunities for growth or promotion. And so in our world where, you know, remote people are on equal footing with, you know, their physical counterparts in a hybrid setup, let’s say, you know, we think there’s a lot of benefit to being an employee in Kumo space.

John Jantsch (20:48): Yeah. And I’ve heard one, one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard of remote or not being able to be in an office, particularly like you said, for junior employees, it’s a lot of times mentors are not people they report to. They’re people in other departments. They’re people that, you know, have just taken ’em under their wing and it, and they’re, it feels like the, they’ve lost that connection a little bit.

Brett Martin (21:07): A a hundred percent. And you know, that’s one of the biggest benefits of companies. That’s what we consider, you know, replacing the in person bringing, making the in person person experience. Virtual is the ability to just walk over, tap someone on the shoulder and you know, Hey, can I take you five minutes of your time? And you know, not everyone is so brave enough to but their way into a Zoom call or set up a meeting or an email or even Slack, someone whose face they’ve never seen. And so a big part of our job is actually building software to facilitate these kind of natural, you know, human connections. Uh,

John Jantsch (21:42): So, so you’ve raised just a little bit of money. What’s the future build or the future? I mean, do you, what’s the roadmap look like?

Brett Martin (21:51): Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of SAS products are, you know, they’re kind of like a point solution for a very specific, you know, problem. And that’s why we have kind of proliferation of SAS tools. We realize that we are kind of a, a core piece of communications infrastructure in the same way that an office is a core piece of, you know, operational and communication infrastructure for a physical office. You know, so same with the virtual office. And we have people spending, you know, like I said, 6, 7, 8 hours a day in Kumo space. So frankly, we have a lot to build and you know, a lot of software to build and yeah, we raised, you know, money. We, one is obviously communication has to be clear and crisp and just reliable. Two, you know, kumo space has to just be available wherever you want it, whether it’s on the web or on your desktop or under, you know, mobile app Mobile, right.

(22:42): Or in the tools you’re using and Slack and Zoom and, you know, make it easy to get in outta kumo space. And then we, you know, we need to make it really engaging and fun, right? Like, you don’t wanna spend, I mean it’s, we think of a lot as what you saw toward the, you know, 20 19, 20, 20 18, 20 19. And a lot of these big well funded corporates were spending a ton of money on the physical office. And they were doing that, you know, they were doing lunches and they were doing cafes and they were doing nap pods and they were doing, you know, massages and they were bringing in programming, right. And that was to, you know, make it easier and more compelling to spend more time at work. Yeah. And I, you know, we see a lot of what we’re doing as bringing those same bells and whistles and those opportunities to connect and those opportunities for mentorship into the remote workspace.

John Jantsch (23:34): Awesome. I am speaking with Brent Martin. He is the co-founder of Kumo Space. That’s kumo space of.com. You wanna tell people where they can find you and connect.

Brett Martin (23:45): Yeah. So thanks so much for having me again, just Brett Martin, I’m on Twitter. It’s Brett, b r e 1 2 11. Or you can just email me@brettkumospace.com and yeah, we’d love to hear from you and if you have a remote team, happy to hook you up with a virtual office.

John Jantsch (24:02): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to, and I usually end the show by saying we’ll see you someday out there on the road, but I guess I need to say, uh, see you in the virtual office.

Brett Martin (24:10): See you. See you in the metaverse, John. Thank you . All.